
Class JjA2l 



Book^k- 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/historyhistorian01gooc 



HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 



IN THE 



NINETEENTH CENTURY 



BY 

G. P. GOOCH 



LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 

39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 

NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA 

1913 



fV 



i\ 






- 



>f6 



PREFACE 

The object of this work is to summarise and assess the manifold 
achievements of historical research and production during the 
last hundred years, to portray the masters of the craft, to trace 
the development of scientific method, to measure the political, 
religious and racial influences that have contributed to the 
making of celebrated books, and to analyse their effect on the 
life and thought of their time. No such survey has been 
attempted in any language. The development of modern 
historiography is only treated incidentally in the excellent 
handbooks of Bernheim and Gustav Wolf. Langlois offers 
little more than a skeleton. Flint and Molinier deal with France 
alone. Wegele confines himself to Germany and halts on the 
threshold of the nineteenth century. Fueter's admirable 
' Geschichte der neueren Historiographies published in 1911, pro- 
vides a comprehensive review from Petrarch to our own day ; but 
the main portion of the book is devoted to the earlier centuries, 
and its methods and aims differ fundamentally from those of 
the present work, in which the curtain rises on Niebuhr. The 
evolution of German, French and Anglo-Saxon scholarship is 
related in detail, and is followed by a brief survey of the achieve- 
ments of other States. The six international chapters which 
conclude the volume describe departments of study in which 
scholars of every nation have co-operated, namely, the recovery 
of the ancient world, the exploration of ecclesiastical history, and 
the reconstruction of the wider aspects of the life of humanity. 
For a bird's-eye view of the ground which is here examined in 
detail I may perhaps be permitted to refer to the closing 
chapter of the closing volume of the ' Cambridge Modern 
History. ' 

G. P. G. 

January 191 3. 



CONTENTS 



chap. Introduction ..... 

I. Niebuhr ...... 

II. Wolf, Bockh and Otfried Muller 

III. - ElCHHORN AND SAVIGNY . 

IV. Jacob Grimm ..... 

V. The 'Monumenta Germanise Historica 

VI. Kanke ...... 

VII. Ranke's Critics and Pupils 

VIII. The Prussian School 

IX. The Renaissance of Historical Studies in France 

X. The Romantic School — Thierry and Michelet 

XI. The Political School — Guizot, Mignet and Thiers 

XII. The Middle Ages and the Ancien Regime 

XIII. The French Revolution. 

XIV. Napoleon 

XV. From Hallam to Macaulay 

XVI. Thirlwall, Grote and Arnold 

XVII. Carlyle and Froude 

XVIII. The Oxford School 

XIX. Gardiner and Lecky, Seeley and Creighton 

XX. Acton and Maitland 

" XXI. " The United States . 

XXII. Minor Countries 

XXIII. Mommsen and Roman Studies 

XXIV. Greece and Byzantium . 
XXV. The Ancient East . 

XXVI. The Jews and the Christian Church 

XXVII. Catholicism 

XXVIII. ,The History of Civilisation 



PAGE 

I 

14 
24 

42 

54 
64 
7*6 
10 
130 
156 
169 
186 
206 
226 

255 
282 
308 
323 
34° 
359 
379 
402 

425 
454 
475 
496 
521 
549 
573 



HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

IN THE 

NINETEENTH CENTURY 

INTRODUCTION 

The Middle Ages produced historical writers of high literary 
merit — Matthew Paris and Lambert of Herzfeld, Joinville and 
Froissart — whose testimony to events of their own time was 
fairly trustworthy ; but the essential conditions of study did 
not exist. Printing was unknown and books were rare. The 
critical treatment of documents had not begun, nor was it 
realised that there was need to treat them critically. Happy 
in the treasures of his monastic library, the pious chronicler 
did not stop to investigate their value, and with equal innocence 
copied earlier compilations into his own pages. Though the 
forging of charters was a regular trade, the means of discovering 
such forgeries had not been invented. Recorded events were 
accepted without challenge, and the sanction of tradition guaran- 
teed the reality of the occurrence. Finally, the atmosphere of 
the Middle Ages was saturated with theology. The influence of 
Augustine weighed with an almost physical pressure on the 
mind of Europe for a thousand years, diverting attention from 
. secular history and problems. In view of the constant inter- 
position of Providence, the search for natural causation became 
needless and even impertinent. History was a sermon, not a 
science, an exercise in Christian evidences, not a disinterested 
attempt to understand and explain the course of civilisation. 1 

1 The best account of the development of historiography since the 
Renaissance is in Fueter, Geschichte der neueren Historiographie, 191 1. 
Wegele, Geschichte der Deutschen Historiographie, 1885, is indispensable 
for Germany. Molinier, Les Sources de I'Histoire de France, vol. v., 1904; 
Flint, Historical Philosophy in France, 1893 ; and Monod, ' Du Progres des 
Etudes historiques en France,' Revue Historique, vol. i., are useful for France. 

B 



2 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

The great revolution in the outlook of mankind, which began 
in Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, led to the crea- 
tion of some of the conditions in which objective methods and 
a genetic conception of history could arise. The revelation that 
the classical world was not a shadowy tradition but a brilliant 
reality stimulated curiosity and suggested the study of develop- 
ment. Comparative inquiry was further encouraged by the 
discovery of the New World and the establishment of closer 
relations with the East. Within the limits of a couple of genera- 
tions the realm of space and the horizon of learning were 
doubled. While the frontiers of knowledge were being pushed 
back, a change scarcely less momentous was beginning to appear 
in the intellectual atmosphere. The increasing corruption of the 
Church, the development of town life, the expansion of commerce 
had already begun to act as solvents of the theological spirit ; 
and the rapturous seduction of pagan culture, at once beautiful, 
lofty and frankly human, completed the process of emancipation. 
The Italian Renaissance stands not so much for a revolt against 
authority as for the secularisation of thought. A joyous pride 
in man, in the power of his mind and the beauty of his body, 
succeeded to the brooding asceticism of mediaeval ideals. For 
speculations on the spiritual nature and prospects of mankind 
were substituted inquiries into his earthly achievements. The 
Middle Ages begin with Augustine and end with Machiavelli. 

The new spirit was reflected in the field of historical study. 
The earliest masters of the new learning, Petrarch and Boccaccio, 
were the fathers of modern historiography. They were, how- 
ever, only amateurs ; and the finished model was provided by 
the Florentine Bruni, the first historian who on principle 
employed criticism. Aiming at the closest possible reproduction 
of the classics, Bruni and his brother humanists condemned 
themselves to sterile imitation ; but they took the step without 
which progress was impossible by substituting natural for super • 
natural causation. A further stage was reached when Machiavelli 
and Guicciardini lifted historiography out of literature and 
related it to the life of states. Tradition began to appear rather 
as a challenge than as a command. Lorenzo Valla exploded the 
Donation of Constantine, and iEneas Sylvius, the humanist 
Pope, confronted marvels and legends in a spirit of healthy 
scepticism. Humanistic historiography quickly spread over 
Europe.i The pleiad of scholars whose rays illuminated the 
court of Maximilian, himself an historian, aroused interest in the 

1 See Joackimsen, Geschichtsauffassung in Deutschland unter dem Einfluss 
des Humanismus, 1910. 



INTRODUCTION 3 

heroes and achievements of the Teutonic races. Celtis lectured 
on the Germania, Cuspinian edited Jordanes and Otto of Freising, 
Peutinger and Beatus Rhenanus plunged into the study of 
German antiquities, and Aventin compiled the Annals of Bavaria. 
They introduced into Central Europe the ideal and the methods 
of secular study and disinterested scholarship. It was of this 
that Goethe was thinking when he declared that the Reformation 
had thrown back European culture for a hundred years. 

The career of humanism was rudely cut short by the appear- 
ance of Luther. Theology once more became dominant, and 
secular studies were engulfed in the whirlpool of confessional 
strife. But the fever contained within itself the germ of its cure. 
The controversialists of the Middle Ages appealed to reason, their 
successors to history. Prced-pue historia opus est in ecclesia, 
declared Melanchthon. Protestantism was compelled not only 
to prove that the Church of the Medici Popes was not the Church 
of the early Christians but also to show how degeneration had 
taken place. The Catholics, for their part, when it became 
clear that heretical Europe was not to be dragooned, attempted 
to confound their enemies by the revelation of material facts 
of which they were unaware. In the fierce struggle victory, not 
truth, was the aim ; but precious documents were brought to 
light. When Flacius and his collaborators, under the auspices 
of the Lutheran princes, hurled the Magdeburg Centuries at 
the enemy, the Curia directed Baronius to prepare an exhaustive 
refutation and placed the Vatican archives at his disposal. 
Though, as Casaubon was to show, the mighty edifice was to a 
large extent a house of cards, though its author was ignorant 
of Greek and accepted forgeries and legends with childlike faith, 
the mass of new material and the apparent completeness of the 
reply rendered the appearance of the Annals one of the decisive 
events of the Counter-Reformation. 

The seventeenth century witnessed a gradual decline of 
confessional violence ; but historical studies remained predomi- 
nantly ecclesiastical. The great school of Anglican divines, 
from Ussher to Bingham, whose situation midway between Rome 
and Geneva was favourable to a balanced view of controversial 
questions, produced works of enduring importance on the early 
Church. The Belgian Jesuits, under the guidance of Bolland 
and Papebroch, began a collection of Lives of the Saints on so 
vast a scale that it is still in progress. Even greater were the 
services rendered by France. The Gallican theologians subjected 
Ultramontane contentions to severe scrutiny, while the Jansenist 
Tillemont gathered materials for his priceless works on the 



4 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

Church and the Roman Empire, and Baluze explored the history 
of the Avignon Popes. Above all, the Benedictines of St. 
Maur * began to pour forth the great series of works which threw 
light on almost every province of ecclesiastical history. No 
page in the annals of learning is more glorious than that which 
records the labours of these humble but mighty scholars in an 
age when an abstract Cartesianism was the dominant philosophy, 
when the State stood aloof and public interest was hardly born. 
The century which started from Baronius and culminated in 
Mabillon cannot be accused of stagnation. 

Though the main theme of historians during the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries was the Christian Church, subjects of 
a secular character attracted the attention of isolated inquirers, 
for the most part laymen. Pithou and Pasquier explored the 
origin of French institutions, Du Cange mapped the unknown 
territory of the Byzantine Empire, D'Herbelot summarised 
existing knowledge of the East, and Mezerai wrote the history 
of France in the critical spirit of a constitutionalist. Mariana 
presented his countrymen with a national history of Spain, and 
Zurita compiled the Annals of Aragon. In Italy the effort of 
Sigonius to reconstruct the institutions of Rome stands out as 
an isolated achievement. In England Bacon wrote the Life of 
Henry VII and Lord Herbert of Henry VIII, Camden laboured 
at British Antiquities, and Selden traced the history of law. 
In German}?- Conring conducted profound investigations into the 
origins of German law. But it was in Holland that secular 
scholarship had the widest scope. Scaliger had made his home 
among the Dutch long before he published the monumental 
work which founded scientific chronology. Grater's collection 
of inscriptions was prepared under his eye, and the long series 
of works by the Leyden Professors on classical antiquity con- 
tinued his tradition. 

Among the few attempts that were made to determine the 
principles and methods of historical study the treatise of 
Bodin stands out as a bold and brilliant achievement. At the 
height of the religious wars the French publicist envisages history 
as a secular subject and approaches it in a thoroughly scientific 
spirit. In language which anticipates Montesquieu he points 
out the influence of geographical situation, climate and soil on 
the character and fortunes of nations, while on the other hand 
he calls attention to the influence of personal position, patriotic 

1 The best account of the Benedictine scholars is to be found in the 
volumes of Emmanuel de Broglie on Mabillon and Montfaucon, 1888 and 
1891. 



INTRODUCTION 5 

and religious bias, and opportunity of knowledge on the views 
and value of writers. No such insight into the operation of 
environment had been possessed by any previous thinker, and 
nothing was added to it for a couple of centuries. In the region 
of criticism a few results were obtained, though rather in the 
nature of anticipations than of definite conquests. Spinoza 
declared that the Old Testament must be treated like any other 
historical work, and Pere Simon incurred the wrath of Bossuet 
when he began to apply critical methods to the Jewish Scriptures. 
Launoi earned the name of the denicheur de Saints by his ruthless 
handling of the records of the martyrs. Ussher identified the 
letters of Ignatius, and Perizonius suggested that the early 
history of Rome was legendary. Above all, Mabillon laid the 
foundations of the science of Latin diplomatic. 

With the eighteenth century the scope of historical study 
rapidly widened. While the task of collecting material was 
steadily pursued, a more critical attitude towards authorities 
and tradition was adopted, the first literary narratives were 
composed and the first serious attempts were made to interpret 
the phenomena of civilisation. We may glance at the output of 
the century under these four heads. 

In the storage of erudition the French Benedictines main- 
tained the supremacy that they had established in the seventeenth 
century. Ruinart sifted the records of the early martyrs, Mont- 
faucon laid the foundations of Greek palaeography and classical 
archaeology, Bouquet collected the historians of France, Clement 
compiled the first comprehensive chronology in his ' L'Art de 
verifier les dates,' Sainte-Marthe wrote the history of the provinces 
of Christian Gaul, Vaissete and De Vic compiled the Annals of 
Languedoc, Rivet commenced the mighty ' Histoire litteraire de la 
France ' which is still far from its completion. While all the 
world around them was changing, these modest and faithful 
scholars found happiness in their tranquil labours, till their 
congregation was swept away by the Revolution. Muratori's 
stupendous labours in collecting the sources of Italian history, 
in compiling its annals and discussing its antiquities secure him 
a place by the side of Mabillon. The fortunes of the Church were 
studied by the scholarly ecclesiastics who surrounded Benedict 
XIV, while Tiraboschi compiled a record of Italian literature 
which is still not only unrivalled but unapproached. In Germany 
Leibnitz collected the early records of the House of Brunswick 
and compiled the Annals of the Mediaeval Empire first published 
a century later. The Austrian Jesuit, Eckhel, devoted his life 
to the collection and classification of coins. In England, Wharton 



6 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

and Strype, Hearne and Madox, Hickes, Rymer and Wilkins 
continued the traditions of Tanner and Dugdale. The erudition 
of these scholars has never been surpassed, and their works remain 
inexhaustible storehouses of learning to which serious students 
must have continual recourse. 

Though the great collectors rarely applied critical tests to 
their material, sources and traditions began to be scrutinised 
with greater freedom. On the eve of the eighteenth centur}^ 
Bentley exposed the Epistles of Phalaris ; and during its course 
Astruc discovered the composite nature of Genesis, Reimarus 
and Semler instituted the critical discussion of the Gospels, and 
Vico challenged the unity of the Homeric poems. Valuable 
results were obtained in the Memoirs contributed by the members 
of the French Academy of Inscriptions and the debates to which 
they gave rise. 1 The greatest interest was aroused by the pro- 
longed discussion of the credibility of the records of early Rome 
initiated in 1722 by Pouilly, who boldly declared that nothing 
was certain before Pyrrhus. The Abbe Sallier, scenting danger 
to religion, denounced him as an atheist. Freret intervened as a 
peacemaker, suggesting that truth and legend were often mixed. 
The subject was independently investigated by Beaufort, whose 
work on the Uncertainty of the Early Centuries of Roman history 
confirmed the conclusions of Pouilly and anticipated the argu- 
ments of Niebuhr. The contribution of the Academy towards 
the formation of critical methods was by no means exhausted by 
these debates. Freret, its illustrious secretary, taking all antiquity 
for his province, carried chronology beyond Scaliger and Petavius 
and analysed the sources of Greek mythology, while his prolonged 
study of Oriental languages led him to suspect the affinity of the 
Indo-European races. ' If he had enjoyed the liberty which 
we possess,' declares Thierry, ' the science of our institutions 
and our social origins would have been born a century earlier.' 
In the later part of the century the attention of the Academy 
was largely directed towards archaeology to which the partial 
excavation of Herculaneum gave a marked impetus ; and De 
Brosses and Barthelemy brought back valuable results from 
Italy before Winckelmann had crossed the Alps. 

The critical study of history was assisted by the great atmo- 
spheric change which has won for the eighteenth century the 
title of Saeculum rationalisticum. The seventeenth century had 
witnessed sporadic outbursts of scepticism, checked by a lively 
fear of temporal penalties. As its successor dawned a cool blast 

1 See Maury's L' Ancienne Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 
1864. 



INTRODUCTION 

blew across Europe, and by the middle the sun of the Aufkldnmg 
was high in the heavens. Within the lifetime of Fontenelle 
France passed from the world of Bossuet to the age of Voltaire 
from Port-Royal to the Encyclopedic. The criticism of existing 
practices and of inherited beliefs reacted on one another. The 
fashion of throwing doubt on testimony and tradition was set by 
Bayle ; but it was to Voltaire more than any other man that the 
new attitude towards the past was due. While Bayle was a 
sceptic, Voltaire was a rationalist ; and the crushing weight of 
authority could only be overthrown by a whole-hearted champiorr 
of the might and majesty of reason. With all his intellectual 
and moral faults Voltaire claims a high place among the influences 
that prepared the world for historical science. By allowing his 
razor-edged intelligence to play freely over vast ranges hitherto 
unchallenged by critical thought, he did much to destroy the 
blind credulity against which erudition alone was powerless. 

The seventeenth century witnessed the appearance of works 
of high value — relating either to events in which their authors 
had taken part or to the immediate past — by Sarpi and Davila, 
D'Aubigne and De Thou, Clarendon and Burnet, Hoofd and 
Puffendorf ; but surveys of national life were scarcely attempted. 
In the new century a polished narrative of English history was 
produced by Hume, of Scotland by Robertson. Henault 
compiled a chronological handbook on which Frenchmen were 
nourished till Sismondi. Mascov and Schmidt recorded the 
fortunes of Germany, Johannes Miiller the epic of the Swiss 
cantons. Schlozer narrated the story of Slavonic Europe, and 
Putter traced the institutions of the Holy Roman Empire. 
Cellarius abandoned the traditional framework of the Five 
Monarchies, which had prevented a rational conception of the 
development of civilisation ; and a group of obscure English 
writers produced the first comprehensive Universal History, 
which, though destitute of literary qualities, brought together 
a mass of material not easily accessible, and which, in translations 
and abridgments, held its own till it was superseded by Rotteck 
and Schlosser. Above all, Gibbon constructed a bridge from the 
old world to the new which is still the highway of nations, and 
stands erect long after every other structure of the time has fallen 
into ruins. 

Though the history of States naturally formed the main 
object of study, other aspects of the life of humanity began to 
claim attention. The first comprehensive Church History was 
written by Mosheim. Art as a product and mirror of civilisation 
received its first adequate treatment from Winckelmann, whom 



8 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

Goethe called a new Columbus. In his History of Osnabruck 
Justus Moser gave the first example of social history. Above 
all Voltaire founded a new genre, now known as Kulturgeschichte. 
In his ' Age of Louis XIV ' we receive the first picture of the 
multiform life of a civilised State. A few years later his ' Essai 
sur les Moeurs,' the first real history of mankind, portrayed the 
moral, social, economic, artistic and literary life of Europe from 
Charles the Great to Louis XIII. His object, he declared, was 
the history of the human mind. He desired to trace the steps by 
which society had passed from the barbarism of the Middle Ages 
to the civilisation of his own time, to indicate the growth of 
enlightenment and social refinement. The sparkling brilliance 
of the style and the novelty of treatment combined to secure 
an ever-widening influence for a book which more than any other 
work of the century enlarged the horizon of historical study. 
Despite its glaring faults the historiography of the Aufklarung 
marks a real advance. It put an end to the era of mere com- 
pilation. It widened the scope of history from a record of events 
to a survey of civilisation. It attempted to introduce critical 
standards and sociological principles. 

Final]y, the eighteenth century witnessed a bold advance 
towards the philosophic interpretation of the life of humanity. 1 
The rudimentary conception of progress in Bacon's aphorism, 
Antiquitas saeculi juvenilis mundi, is developed by Pascal. 
' The whole succession of human beings through the whole 
course of ages must be regarded as a single man, ever living and 
ever learning.' In the literary quarrel of the Ancients and 
Moderns, Perrault maintained that we should not only admire 
the achievements of the classical world but perfect them by the 
addition of all that we had subsequently learned. In a fine 
image he declared that the interruption in the Middle Ages was 
only apparent, like a river which flows for some distance under- 
ground. Fontenelle maintained that though the life of a nation 
passed through stages like the individual, there was no decline. 
His scientific studies indeed suggested to him a certain relation 
between the movement of human history and ' the great and 
universal movement which has directed all nature.' The 
doctrine of perfectibility appealed to the new-born enthusiasm 
for man and meets us constantly throughout the eighteenth 
century, from the Abbe Saint -Pierre at the beginning to Godwin, 
Condorcet and the Illuminati at the end. 

These utterances were rather the expression of generous hopes 
than the reasoned product of philosophic reflection. No rational 
1 See Delvaille's massive Essai sur I'Histoire de I'Idee de Progres, 1910. 



INTRODUCTION g 

interpretation of history was possible till the doctrine of evolution 
was enunciated by Leibnitz. ' Nothing happens all at once,' 
we read in ' Nouveaux Essais,' ' and nature never makes jumps. 
I call that the law of continuity. In starting from ourselves 
and going down to the lowest, it is a descent by very small steps, 
a continuous series of things which differ very little — fishes with 
wings, animals very like vegetables, and again animals which seem 
to have as much reason as some men.' As nature advanced by 
small steps so humanity moved slowly and painfully forward. 
The lonely Neapolitan thinker, Vico, in discussing the laws of 
change in his ' Scienza Nuova,' added that the process of 
history was cyclic. The principle was further elaborated in 
Turgot's Discourse at the Sorbonne on the Successive Advances 
of the Human Mind. History, he declared in terms to which 
we can add little, was the life of humanity, ever progressing 
through decay and revival, each age linked equally to those 
which have gone before and those that are to come. Anticipating 
Comte, he outlined the law of the three states through which the 
human mind passes in its progressive apprehension of reality. 
Progress was nothing narrower than the gradual evolution and 
elevation of man's nature, a combined advance in material 
well-being, mental enlightenment and virtue. Cousin has called 
Turgot the father of the philosophy of history, and no one has a 
better right to the name. Further contributions to a theory of 
progress were made towards the end of the century in Germany. 
At the close of his life, as from a lofty watch-tower, Lessing sur- 
veyed the panorama of history and recorded his impressions in 
the pregnant aphorisms on the Education of the Human Race. 
The human mind, he declared, was greater than any of the 
influences that moulded it. Religion was a progressive revelation, 
and religions were the school-books which man uses in his 
progress, each helpful at a certain stage of development, none 
of them final. It is the thought of Pascal without the limitations 
of his theology. But the most detailed and exhaustive investi- 
gation into the conditions and nature of progress was contained 
in Herder's Ideas on the History of Humanity. Deeply im- 
pressed by the influence of cosmic factors, he emphasises the 
existence of similar laws in history and nature. At the end of 
the century, in combating the French Revolution, Burke em- 
phasised the continuity of historic life and the debt of every age 
to its predecessors. 

In addition to these speculations on the nature of progress, 
serious endeavours were made to explain particular factors of 
civilisation. Montesquieu investigated the origin and influence 



lo HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

of laws and institutions, explaining that they must be judged 
not by abstract principles but by their suitability to the circum- 
stances of the time. Of no less importance was the study of the 
economic elements in historical development. Hume reached some 
illuminating sociological generalisations in his Essays ; but it 
was the glory of Adam Smith to relate the rise and fall of nations 
to their economic and commercial equipment and policy. A 
generation later Malthus built his law of population on a basis 
of elaborate historical induction. 

Though work of high merit and enduring value was thus 
accomplished during the eighteenth century, several obstacles 
impeded the growth of genuine historical science. In the first 
place the spirit of the Aufkldrung was unfavourable to the develop- 
ment of the historical sense. The seventeenth century had 
witnessed a gradual fall of the theological temperature, and 
Bossuet's ' Histoire Universelle ' may be taken as the last consider- 
able work of the theological era. But with its secularisation 
history entered on a career attended by new and scarcely less 
formidable dangers. The abstract and absolute standard, the 
failure to realise the differences in atmosphere and outlook in 
different ages, and the zeal for political and philosophic pro- 
paganda were hostile to patient research and disinterested 
investigation. The conception of continuity was the property of 
a few isolated thinkers. The more popular doctrines of the 
social contract, with its assumption of deliberate action, and of 
the law of Nature, with its idealisation of primitive society, were 
the negation of history. The French Revolution defiantly turned 
its back on the past, as the sleeper shakes off the nightmare which 
has oppressed him. Thus the tendency of the age encouraged 
writers to content themselves with superficial inquiry. Boling- 
broke urged the study of modern history as politically useful, 
but condemned erudite research as learned lumber. Robertson 
wrote the Life of Charles V without learning German. Some 
of the most popular books of the century, such as Schiller's 
narrative of the Dutch War of Independence, were the fruit of 
but meagre learning and an untrained judgment. 

The limitations of the Aufkldrung were most apparent in its 
treatment of the religious sentiment and of the Middle Ages. 
A knowledge of Greece and Rome was fairly general, partly 
owing to the familiarity of the cultured classes with classical 
literature and partly because the ideas and institutions of the 
ancient world formed the inspiration of reformers. But the 
Middle Ages were like a sealed book, not only to the deist and the 
rationalist but to the Trinitarian ' Enthusiasm ' was equally 



INTRODUCTION n 

distasteful to the believer and the sceptic. Hume dismissed the 
Anglo-Saxon centuries, the time of the making of England, as a 
battle of kites and crows. Voltaire declared that the early 
Middle Ages deserved as little study as the doings of wolves and 
bears, and revealed his moral and intellectual inability to under- 
stand mediaeval Christendom in ' La Pucelle.' Robertson's famous 
Introduction to the Life of Charles V is tainted with ignorant 
disdain. Gibbon's contempt for religious feelings and belief 
rendered him blind to the significance of many of the principal 
objects which he passed in the course of his long journey. It 
was his immortal service to show how the Roman Empire lived on ; 
but of the new world into which it survived he understood as 
little as other men. It was only towards the end of the century 
that sympathy for the Middle Ages came in with Johannes 
Miiller and the Romantic movement. 

A second disability was the lack of the critical faculty in 
dealing with the value and testimony of authorities. Histories 
of France began with copious details of Pharamond ; and Rollin 
and Hooke paraphrased Livy, undismayed by the discussions in 
the Academy of Inscriptions. To Johannes Miiller all chronicles 
and charters were of equal value so long as they were old, and 
his popularity was largely due to the brilliant rendering of the 
patriotic legends of Tschudi. Where scepticism existed, it was 
often as uncritical as credulity. La Mothe le Vayer, in his 
Discourse on the uncertainty of History, declared that a wise 
man would doubt all things except divinely revealed truths ; 
and Bayle, who owed much to him, was equally the enemy of 
reason and faith. The learned Jesuit Hardouin maintained that 
the history of the ancient world was fabricated by monks of the 
thirteenth century, the real authors of Thucydides, Livy and 
Tacitus. In spite of Mabillon, the technique of research was 
still in its infanc}^. 

A third reason why historical study made no greater advance 
was the almost entire absence of teaching. It was indeed recog- 
nised that history was essential to the education of rulers. 
Bossuet declared that it was the counsellor of princes, and wrote 
his ' Histoire Universelle ' for the instruction of the Dauphin. 
Fenelon composed a Life of Charlemagne for the Duke of Bur- 
gundy. Burnet employed the lessons of history to counteract the 
influences that surrounded his pupil, the Duke of Gloucester. 
Histories of the Powers were specially written by various hands 
for the youthful Joseph II. But in the statutes of Henri IV for 
the University of Paris history is not mentioned, and it found 
no place in the curriculum of the Jesuits, the educators of half 



12 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

Europe. Fenelon gave it no place in his 'Education des Filles.' 
The Cartesians disparaged it, and Malebranche declared that 
there was more truth in a single principle of metaphysics than in 
all historical books. The ignorance in which children were com- 
pelled to grow up provoked occasional remonstrance. Fleury 
expressed the wish that everyone should know the history of his 
town and province. Rollin lamented that no time was allowed 
in school for the teaching of the history of France, ' which it is a 
disgrace for every good Frenchman to ignore ' ; and he added that 
he felt himself a stranger in his own country. D'Alembert 
declared that it was scandalous for children to leave school without 
any notion of the history of their country. A few isolated 
attempts were made to impart instruction. In England Camden 
endowed a Readership of Ancient History at Oxford in 1622, and 
Lord Brooke a Lectureship at the sister University in 1628, 
which was speedily extinguished on the ground that Dorislaus, 
its first holder, mixed politics with his teaching. George I 
founded a Chair of Modern History at both Universities ; but the 
Professors, among whom was the poet Gray, rarely or never 
lectured. Not till the creation of a Chair of History and Morals 
at the College de France in 1769 did France recognise the claim 
of history to rank with the older sciences. The youth of Germany 
was better supplied. The foundation of Gottingen inaugurated 
advanced teaching by scholars of acknowledged competence, 
whose influence will be traced in later chapters. 

A fourth disability was the restriction placed on the access 
to documents and on the liberty to announce results. The 
expense and danger of travel rendered it difficult for a student 
to consult the authorities he needed for his task ; and his troubles 
were increased by the miserliness with which the possessors of 
archives guarded their treasures. Manuscripts were regarded as 
useful for the determination of practical questions of law and 
precedent. When an archivist was appointed in East Friesland 
in 1729, he was informed by his employers that ' after learning the 
secrets of our house he must carry them to the grave and reveal 
them to nobody.' No one was allowed to use the archives at 
Stuttgart without the express permission of the Duke. The 
title of Court Historiographer possessed a real meaning when its 
holder was regarded as the defender of the glory and dignity of 
the dynasty. It was in this spirit that Puffendorf was commis- 
sioned to write the Life of the great Elector, and Leibnitz to 
investigate the origins of the House of Brunswick. When 
Muratoriwas collecting for the Scriptores, several Italian princes 
refused him access to their archives on the ground that he might 



INTRODUCTION 13 

find, arguments against their territorial pretensions. A single 
false step might ruin a career. Thus when the Jacobite Carte 
mentioned in a note the case of an Englishman who had been 
cured of the king's evil by the touch of the Pretender, the grant 
given by the Common Council of London was withdrawn and 
the work was boycotted. The trade of historian was scarcely 
less dangerous than that of a journalist. Mezerai, an old 
Frondeur, was deprived of his pension for some comments on 
the fiscal expedients of the predecessors of Louis XIV. Giannone 
was exiled from Naples for his history of Neapolitan institutions, 
and died in prison. Freret was sent to the Bastille for main- 
taining that the Franks were not of Gallic race. Pere Daniel 
was fiercely attacked for eliminating Pharamond and other 
legendary heroes commonly called the first four Kings of France, 
and the Abbe Velly found it necessary to restore them to their 
thrones. In Austria the censorship was particularly active 
during the long reign of Maria Theresa, the entrance of foreign 
books being almost entirely checked. A brief interval of en- 
lightenment occurred when the Emperor Joseph succeeded his 
mother ; but obscurantism returned with his death. 

In addition to the dangers which historians incurred from 
the operations of the secular censorship, they were confronted 
in Catholic countries by the might of the Church. Though the 
paralysing influence of the Index and the Inquisition was felt 
most directly in the realm of speculation and science, it was 
hardly less fatal to disinterested historical research. Sincere 
Catholicism was no defence against accusation and condemna- 
tion, and even Muratori was only saved by the intervention of 
his friend Benedict XIV. To realise the sterilising effect of the 
censorship, lay and ecclesiastical, we must not forget that the 
fear of its penalties probably prevented the writing of as many 
books as it condemned. Thus the conditions which rendered 
it possible to set forth the truth without fear or favour were as 
rare as the will to learn it and the critical equipment required 
for its discovery. For the liberty of thought and expression, 
the insight into different ages and the judicial temper on which 
historical science depends, the world had to wait till the nine- 
teenth century, the age of the Second Renaissance. 



/s 



CHAPTER I 

NIEBUHR 

CHAP. The first commanding figure in modern historiography, the 
I scholar who raised history from a subordinate place to the dignity 
of an independent science, the noble personality in whom the 
greatest historians of the succeeding generation found their 
model or their inspiration, was Niebuhr. 1 Of the influences 
which combined to mould his mind and character,- the earliest 
and the deepest was that of his father. The great traveller was 
^one of the most remarkable men of his time. With rare energy 
he had set himself to learn the languages and study the history 
of the ancient East on being chosen to accompany the expedition 
sent by the King of Denmark. Beginning with a year in Egypt, 
followed by a prolonged sojourn in Syria and Arabia, he visited 
India, returning through Persia, Bagdad, and Palestine. During 
the years immediately preceding and following the birth of his 
only son, he was engaged in arranging and publishing the results 
of his journey. His adventures formed the chief topic of the 
household and its visitors. His wide and accurate scholarship 
and his knowledge of unknown and little known lands procured 
an instantaneous success for his massive volumes, which found 
their way into the cultured circles of every country in Europe. 
When Barthold was in England, in the last year of the century; 
he was delighted to find the name of his father a household 
word, and he grew up with the determination to be worthy of him. 
The Life of Carsten Niebuhr by his son throws a welcome 
light on the youth and early studies of the historian of Rome. 
' He taught us geography and history, French, English and 

1 The Life and Letters of Niebuhr, Eng. edition, 1852, are among the 
most impressive of biographical memorials. The best brief survey is in 
Classen's B. G. Niebuhr, 1876. Eyssenhardt, B. G. Niebuhr, 1886; Lieber's 
Reminiscences of Niebuhr, 1835 ; Nissen's article in Allg. Deutsche Bio- 
graphie, and Otto Mejer's lecture in his Biographisches, 1886, are also 
important. 



NIEBUHR 15 

mathematics, and helped me with Latin. When we read Caesar, he CHAP. 
would spread out D'Anville's map of ancient Gaul on the table, I 
and I had to find every place.' He used to tell his son stories 
of the East when sitting on his knee before bedtime, instead of 
fairy tales. Mohammed and the early Khalifs, the spread of 
Islam and the rise of the Turks were soon familiar to the boy, 
who at the age of ten wrote an historical geography of Africa. 
There is an obvious resemblance to the familiar picture in MiU's'^""' 
Autobiography. In both cases the fathers succeeded in crowd- 
ing their sons' heads in tender years with a boundless mass of 
information and in launching them into intellectual manhood a 
decade earlier than other boys ; but Niebuhr was spared a violent 
emotional crisis. Though the historian, like the philosopher, 
was never young, his youth was tranquil and happy. The nearest 
neighbour was Boie, a member of the Gottingen school of poets, 
and friend of most of the literary men of the day. Barthold 
looked back gratefully to the man ' who introduced me to 
much which would perhaps have long remained unknown to me.' 
Boie, on his side, draws a picture of the lad at fifteen busy with 
a manuscript of Varro from the library at Copenhagen, and reports 
that he dreams of nothing but manuscripts and variants. At 
sixteen he was ' a small miracle of knowledge and of intellectual 
maturity. He will infallibly become a scholar of the first rank.'*^ 
At twenty, ' there is the making of a great man in him.' A 
more powerful influence was that of Voss, the translator of Homer. 
The Odyssey appeared in 1781, and in 1782 he wrote that the 
Niebuhr children talked of nothing but Odysseus and Penelope. 
Homer was the only poetry which Carsten appreciated, and his 
son shared his enthusiasm. Voss, he wrote later, began a new 
era in the understanding of antiquity, because he felt and 
explained it as if its figures had been his contemporaries. 

Carsten wished his son to continue the work of geographical 
exploration ; but the opposition of the mother prevented the 
realisation of a plan which never appealed to Barthold. The 
father then resolved that he should be a diplomatist. The lad, 
however, quickly recognised where his true work lay, and at 
nineteen he wrote the memorable words : ' If my name is to live, y 
it will be as an historian and publicist, as a classic and philologist.' 
At Kiel he studied philosophy and law as well as history, and 
became interested in the system of Roman property. His leisure 
during the following years was devoted to problems of the 
ancient world. ' I know no one else of such talents and industry, \y 
wrote Nicolovius, who met him in 1797 ; ' his soul is like a bee, 
for he collects all the good of our opulent time and never touches 



16 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, poison.' Before he conquered fame at a stroke hei had already 
1 won the reputation of boundless learning. It was to a series of 
external events that the student of history owed his transforma- 
tion into an historian. In the words of his friend Bunsen, ' Nie- 
buhr's life is more intimately connected with the deepest move- 
ments and struggles of suffering humanity in his day than that of 
any other great writer of his age.' On leaving the University 
^■"ne became private secretary to the Danish Minister of Finance. 
«^His prolonged visit to Great Britain; at the age of twenty-three, 
was designed to widen still further his knowledge of administra- 
tive methods, and furnished him with that insight into English 
history and conditions which amazed his visitors in later life. 
Returning to Denmark he entered the service of the Government, 
and for six years helped to direct the financial and commercial 
v/policy of the country, with special reference to the banking and 
commerce of its colonies. His fame reached Berlin, and a few 
weeks before the Prussian kingdom collapsed at Jena he was 

, pressed to transfer his services. The Niebuhr family was German 
on both sides, and the offer was accepted. For the next four 
years he laboured to reconstruct the finances of the country. 
His work was recognised to be of the highest value by Hardenberg, 
•--Stein, and the King. The impression that once prevailed that 
his tenure of office was a failure has been removed by the publi- 
cation of the documents relating to his resignation. 

Niebuhr had followed the French Revolution from its incep- 
tion in the French press. His attitude throughout was one of 
distrust and dislike, though Voss and other friends greeted it 
with enthusiasm. ' Rousseau,' he declared a generation later, 
' was the hero of most intellectual people in my youth, and in 
most parts of Germany the great mass of the nation at first 
approved the Revolution.' From his earliest years he manifested 

%/the invincible repugnance to violent change which accompanied 
him through life and was to hasten his death. He was well aware 
of the abuses of the old regime, and his personal acquaintance with 
the Emigres at Hamburg was to fill him with a lasting contempt 
for their class ; but his ideal was orderly development by process 
hi law. When the forces aroused by the Revolution were har- 

V nessed to the chariot -wheels of Napoleon, his dislike of the 
Revolution hardened into a hatred of France as deep and fierce 
as that of Stein and Fichte, while his love for Germany grew 
into a passionate desire for service. His detestation of revolu- 
tionary methods was deepened by his knowledge of England. In 
later life he referred Bunsen to Burke for political philosophy. 
In his conversations with Lieber at Rome he often remarked 



NIEBUHR / 17 

that without his study of the development of England he could CHAP, 
never have understood the history of Rome. ' The ever growing I 
perfection of the British constitution and freedom since 1688,' 
he wrote, ' affords the noblest picture of collective national wisdom 
and virtue that history can offer. Without a single form being 
altered or abolished, the possession of freedom has gradually^*''' 
spread through the whole nation. The greatest freedom existed 
in all things, the greatest freedom a people ever enjoyed. Never 
perhaps was a land in better circumstance than England at the 
time of the French Revolution. She was the pride and the envy 
of the world.' He had little belief in the merits of particular 
political forms, and was convinced, as he declared in the preface 
to Vincke's treatise on English institutions, that British liberty 
rested far more on administration than on the constitution. v^He 
was blind to the deep shadows in the realm of George III ; but he 
learned the value of a strong central government, resting on a 
broad basis of administrative decentralisation. 

Armed with copious learning and a varied experience of 
public affairs, Niebuhr entered on the great task of his life. 
During the scanty leisure of his official career he had written 
several dissertations on the ancient world ; and on resigning his 
place he resolved to devote himself to the study and interpretation 
of Roman history. The newly founded University of Berlin 
provided a rallying-point for all who desired to rebuild the shat- 
tered fabric of the Prussian state ; and no one more profoundly 
agreed with the famous declaration of the King, ' We must make 
up by intellectual strength what we have lost in material power.' 
He would write ' to regenerate the young men, to render them 
capable of great things, to put before them the noble examples of 
antiquity.' He was urged to deliver lectures, and in 1810 he 
began the course out of which grew the Roman History. Lacking 
experience of public speaking, he read his lectures, which proved' 
an immense success. The teacher's profound earnestness, the 
enthusiasm for learning which inspired the new University, and 
the exaltation which thrilled Prussia as the war of liberation 
approached, combined to attract a large and distinguished 
audience. 

Niebuhr enjoyed the lectures as heartily as his audience, and 
he looked back on the three years during which they were 
delivered as the happiest of his life. Savigny was not flattering 
his friend when he told him that he was opening a new era for 
Roman history. He believed, as no one before him had done, in 
the ethical significance and the patriotic stimulus of historical 
study. He felt himself speaking to his countrymen as directly 



18 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

as Fichte in his Addresses to the German Nation. ' The evil time 
of Prussia's humiliation/ he declared later to Lieber, ' had some 
share in the production of my history. We could do little more 
than ardently hope for better days, and prepare for them. I 
went back to a great nation to strengthen my mind and that of 
my hearers. We felt like Tacitus.' Three sets of lectures had 
been delivered, two on Roman History, the third on Roman 
Antiquities, when the national uprising of 1813 summoned the 
larger part of his audience to the battle-field. Meanwhile, he 
had transformed the first two courses into a book which appeared 
in two volumes in 1811-12, with a dedication to the King, and 
forms the greatest literary monument of the era of liberation. 
Though almost entirely rewritten many years after, the publica- 
tion inaugurated the systematic study of Roman history. 

The investigation of regal and republican Rome had been 
fitfully pursued ever since the revival of learning ; but few had 
attempted to form a clear and coherent conception of the life of 
the State or of the stages of its growth. Machiavelli had used 
Livy as a peg on which to hang his own political reflections and 
maxims. Montesquieu had made a courageous attempt to 
discover the causes of the growth and decay of the Roman State ; 
but his knowledge was scanty and he was at the mercy of his 
materials. Numberless writers had transcribed and abbreviated 
Livy ; but no one before Niebuhr regarded Rome as above all a 
great State, the institutions of which, political, legal and economic, 
must be traced to their origin and followed through their successive 
changes. His experience of government enabled him to approach 
the problem with an insight which no previous historian had 
possessed. No one but a statesman, he declared, could write the 
history of Rome. He had grasped the truth that the early history 
of every nation must be rather of institutions than of events, 
of classes than of individuals, of customs than of lawgivers. The 
story of Roman development is built round the struggle of patri- 
cians and plebeians, who had their origin in the racial differences 
of conquerors and conquered. He draws a clear picture of the 
political issues at stake, and enabled the world to form a vivid 
conception of the State from its origins to the Licinian Laws. 
The agrarian problem was for the first time fully investigated. 
What Grote was to do for the Athenian democracy, Niebuhr 
achieved for the Roman republic by making it as real and 
intelligible as a State of the modern world. 

His second great achievement was the critical examination of 
the sources and credibility of early Roman history. To his scepti- 
cal forerunners Niebuhr owed little or nothing. Beaufort he only 



NIEBUHR 19 

read after the completion of his own work, and pronounced clever CHAP, 
but too exclusively destructive. Of Vico's speculations he I 
appears to have been altogether ignorant. He was certain that 
the accepted narrative could not be true and equally assured 
that it was not wholly false. In the quest for a critical method he 
was entering upon an almost untrodden path ; but a new era 
had been opened by the publication of the Prolegomena to Homer. 
He had thoroughly assimilated Wolf's method and results, and it 
was in large measure from him that he derived his belief that the 
history of early Rome had been enshrined and transmitted in 
poems. He approached his inquiry with a feeling of deep 
responsibility. ' In laying down the pen,' he wrote, ' we must 
be able to say in the sight of God, " I have not knowingly nor 
without earnest investigation written anything which is not 
true." ' Yet he possessed an almost boundless self-confidence. 
He declared that he had ' a correct and very rapid judgment, a 
faculty scarcely capable of deception in discovery of the false 
and incorrect.' He was aware of the revolution he was effecting. 
' One could not have maintained these things in earlier times 
without danger to life and liberty. Philologists would have 
cried treachery, the theologians high treason, and public opinion 
would have stoned one.' His power of divination was as real 
to him as the illative sense to Newman. ' I am an historian,' 
he writes to a friend, ' for I can make a complete picture from 
separate fragments, and I know where the parts are missing and 
how to fill them up. No one believes how much of what seems 
to be lost can be restored.' Using another image, he declared, 
' I dissect words as an anatomist dissects bodies.' On another 
occasion the historian is compared to a man in a cell whose eyes 
gradually become so accustomed to the darkness that he can 
perceive objects which one newly entering not only does not 
see but declares to be invisible. Niebuhr's method recalls the 
conjectural emendations of Bentley, Cobet and Munro. 

What were the channels through which the deeds and cir- 
cumstances of early Rome reached the earliest chroniclers whom 
we possess ? Adopting a suggestion of Perizonius, he replies 
that knowledge was conveyed by songs, funeral panegyrics and 
annals kept by the Pontifex Maximus. Some of the songs were 
separate, while others formed a cycle — ' an epopee, which in 
depth and brilliancy of imagination far surpassed all that later 
Rome was to produce.' He proceeds to review the regal period, 
labelling some events mythical and others historical. Romulus 
and Numa are fabulous. From Tullus Hostilius to the first 
secession of the plebeians is partially historical. ' Between the 



20 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

purely poetical and the completely historical age there is in all 
nations a mythico-historical era.' In a masterly review August 
Schlegel 1 rejected the theory of ballads, and censured the his- 
torian for describing them with a precision as if they were before 
him. If they had existed we might surely have expected to find 
some quotation from them, or some reference in a commentator 
or a grammarian ; but he failed to adduce the slightest evidence 
that they ever existed. His practice of divination again brought 
no small danger with it. His f acuity for remote inferences, for 
detecting implications in a statement or an allusion or an omis- 
sion led him to the discovery of useful clues ; but from its very 
nature it was incurably subjective. Though dim objects are 
seen for the first time by the keen eye of the trained scholar, they 
must not remain invisible to lesser mortals. Macaulay com- 
plained that he did not always distinguish between a proved 
truth and a hypothesis. Cornewall Lewis devoted his ' Inquiry 
into the Credibility of Early Roman History ' to an unsparing de- 
nunciation of his ' occult faculty of historical divination,' declar- 
ing that all labour bestowed on the period before Pyrrhus 
resembled the search for the philosopher's stone or the elixir of 
life. By far the fairest and most authoritative criticism came 
from Schwegler, who essayed to stretch the bow of Ulysses a 
generation later. ' At first, disagreeing in many points, I 
gradually came more and more to agree. In the chief questions 
he almost invariably found the right path. Indeed many of his 
hypotheses in reference to constitutional questions admit of a 
much better defence than their author supplied.' This general 
judgment is confirmed in the course of his work, in which he 
discusses most of Niebuhr's contentions. While rejecting the 
hypothesis of ballads, dismissing many of his conclusions on 
ethnology, and declaring him somewhat unfair to the patricians, 
Schwegler pronounces his analogical method extraordinarily 
successful, above all in his reconstruction of Roman institutions, 
which he was the first to understand. 

When the lectures were interrupted by the war of liberation, 
Niebuhr sought permission to enter the army ; but the King 
wisely replied that he could serve the State more effectively in 
other ways. He accordingly founded a newspaper, in which he 
endeavoured to inspire his countrymen in the great struggle. 
When the war was over, he accepted the task of discussing with 
the Papacy the government and administration of the large 
Catholic population which had been added to Prussia. He 
believed that the mission would not last long ; but the Prussian 
Werke, xii. 444-512. 



NIEBUHR 21 

Ministry were unable to determine the details of his instructions, CHAP. 
for which he had to wait several years in Rome. 1 Though finding I 
no real satisfaction in the work of the Embassy, his exile brought 
compensations with it. The journey opened well with the sensa- 
tional discovery of a manuscript of Gaius at Verona ; but his 
expectation of finding further treasures in the Vatican was 
disappointed. His search, which was not very deep, was only 
rewarded by a few fragments of Sallust and Cicero ; but he 
witnessed the beginning of the long series of discoveries by Mai, 
notably the fragment of Cicero's ' Republic,' which he helped him 
to edit. He steadily increased his knowledge of the ancient 
world, and sent an occasional paper to the Berlin Academy. 
But the historian made less use of his residence in Italy than 
might have been expected. He interested himself, however, in / 
the remains of Rome, and aided the large work which was 
planned by his friend and secretary Bunsen. 

When the Concordat was signed Niebuhr resolved to return 
to Germany and continue his studies. Vigorous efforts were 
made by his old pupil, the Crown Prince, to win him for Berlin ; 
but a number of reasons determined him to make his home in 
Bonn. It is with the University of the Rhineland that the last 
and most productive period of his life is associated. It was there 
that the Roman History assumed its final shape, there that his 
lectures on ancient and modern history left an ineffaceable stamp 
on their hearers, there that he became the acknowledged 
monarch of European scholarship. The Berlin lectures had been 
written ; but at Bonn he spoke freely out of the abundant stores 
of his mind. We have many testimonies to the prodigious effect 
of these addresses, delivered with such moral earnestness that 
his audience sat enthralled. ' He was as excited,' writes a 
pupil, ' as other men are when discussing the politics of our own 
age and country. His thoughts came so rapidly that he could 
not always finish his sentences. But his sincerity, and above all 
the vivid descriptions of men who were to him living realities, 
carried his hearers away.' When the great teacher was gone 
the notebooks of his hearers were produced, and the lectures 
were published in ten volumes. Imperfect as they are, and 
lacking the author's revision, they are none the less of extra- 
ordinary interest. They reveal his immense knowledge of the 
ancient world, and contain his opinions on men and events with 
which his writings do not deal. The lectures on Rome are 
particularly welcome, as they carry the story beyond the point 

1 The whole question and Niebuhr's share in it are fully explained in 
O. Mejer, Zur Geschichte der romisch-deutschen Frage, 1871. 



22 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

reached by the Roman History. The History, which deals far 
more with the institutions and structure of the State than with the 
individuals who composed it, conveys no notion of the intensely 
personal attitude from which Niebuhr approached the past. 
His experiences, above all the central incident of his life, the 
struggle with France, coloured his whole thoughts and erected 
nationalism and the dread of revolution into the dominant prin- 
ciples of his political philosophy. No part of his lectures is 
more suffused with his own personality than that in which he 
relates the collapse of Greece before the might of Macedon. 
Demosthenes is Stein or Fichte, Philip is Napoleon, Chseronea 
is Jena. His most burning indignation is reserved for the 
renegades who welcomed the conqueror ; and in his scathing 
denunciation of Phocion we learn what he thought of Dalberg 
and Johannes Miiller. The course on the French Revolution is 
hardly more personal than many of the lectures which deal with 
the world of two thousand years ago. In addition to his lectures 
Niebuhr's activity extended into many branches of philology. 
He undertook a collection of Byzantine historians, and himself 
edited Agathias. In company with Brandis he founded the 
Rheinisches Museum, a review which still plays an important 
part in classical philology, and contributed largely to its pages. 
His vision ranged prophetically over the future. In 1829 ne 
foretold that Nineveh would be the Pompeii of Middle Asia and 
that a Champollion would arise for Assyria. 

The chief occupation of the years at Bonn and the crown 
of his achievement was the new edition of the History. The 
relation of the earlier to the later work was explained in the 
preface to the first volume, the noblest piece of prose that 
Niebuhr ever wrote. In declaring that the work was entirely 
new and incorporated only a few fragments of the former he 
exaggerates the differences. It is true that every chapter was 
rewritten and that the notes which were so few in the first edition 
were multiplied in the second ; but the method is the same, and 
the results are rarely different. The existence of ballads is still 
assumed, and the divinatory method is applied with unabated 
confidence. It is still a string of dissertations, not a narrative. 
In the preface to the second volume he declares the constitution 
to be his main object, and the history of the constitution could 
only be recovered by a minute examination of the sources. 
' The discussions may be prolix, but I wished to assert nothing 
arbitrarily.' It is the most unreadable of historical classics, 
because the text is loaded with matter usually relegated to notes 
and appendices. ' One imagines oneself,' remarks Taine, ' at 



NIEBUHR 23 

the bottom of a mine, with the murky light of a lamp, close to a CHAP, 
miner scratching laboriously at the hard rock.' Despite these I 
disadvantages, the new edition deservedly gained an immediate 
and resounding fame. ' No discovery of an ancient historian,' 
wrote Niebuhr proudly to Savigny in 1827, ' would have taught 
the world so much as my work, and all that may come to light 
from ancient sources will only confirm or develop my principles.' 
Goethe, who had expressed a wish after the first edition that all 
history should be treated in the same manner, read the new work 
and repeated his congratulations. But nowhere was the Roman 
History so warmly welcomed as in England. Macaulay declared 
that it created an epoch in the history of European intelligence, 
though his admiration diminished in subsequent years. Admirably 
translated by Thiiiwall and Hare, and defended by them against 
the fire of the Quarterly Review, it became a text -book at the 
Universities. Accepting Niebuhr's results and omitting the 
lengthy discussions by which he reached them, Arnold composed 
a History of Rome in which the rough stones were polished and 
fitted into an harmonious structure. A few lesser men continued 
to transcribe Livy as if Niebuhr had never lived ; but the world 
of learning moved a stage forward. He made Roman history 
a living study, and won for history itself the position of an inde- 
pendent science of the first rank. Scarcely was the second 
volume in print when the great historian died. Fragments of 
the third volume appeared in 1832, bringing the story down 
to the first Punic war. 

Niebuhr was cut off at the age of fifty-six, in the fullness of 
his powers and at the height of his influence. But he had begun 
to live ten years earlier than other men, and he had felt the 
troubles of his country as his own. He was, moreover, afflicted 
with a growing irritability which alienated friends and disposed 
him to gloomy views. He lost faith even in England, which he 
described as dying of the cancer of egotism. He had never cast 
off the shadow of the French invasion, and when the Revolution 
of 1830 broke out his overwrought imagination believed that a 
repetition of that terrible experience was at hand. He was 
filled with agonising apprehensions for the safety of his wife and 
children. His health, already shattered by the burning of his 
home and library and by the news from Paris, was too weak to 
resist a chill caught in the closing days of 1830. Goethe declared 
that Niebuhr's thoroughness and depth encouraged him to 
perform his own duties in the same conscientious spirit. He left 
an ineffaceable impression of greatness and goodness in men so 
different as Stein and Schleiermacher, Nicolovius and Frederick 



24 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. William IV, Dahlmann and Jacobi, Arndt and Schon, Savigny 
I and Cornelius, Lieber and Bunsen. Savigny declared that the 
Roman History gave him courage to write the history of Roman 
law ; Ranke that Thucydides, Fichte and Niebuhr were his 
masters ; Grote that it was impossible to pronounce his name 
without veneration and gratitude ; Waitz that he owed more to 
the Roman History than to any other book. In the words of 
Mommsen, all historians, so far as they are worthy of the name, 
are Niebuhr's pupils, not least those who are not of his school. 



CHAPTER II 

WOLF, BOCKH AND OTFRIED MULLER 

While Niebuhr was interpreting the Roman State to the modern CHAP, 
world, the study of Greek civilisation was also entering on a new * 
career. After the disappearance of the great school of Renais- 
sance scholars at the end of the sixteenth century, Greek studies 
rapidly declined. 1 A revival was inaugurated by Bentley, and 
continued by the Leyden triumvirate, Hemsterhuys, Valckenaer 
and Ruhnken. The Dutch scholars, however, confined them- 
selves to pure philology, and had little interest in the history, art 
or philosophy of the Greeks. About the middle of the eighteenth 
century the excavation of Pompeii and Herculaneum aroused 
new interest in classical archaeology. In obedience to this impulse 
Winckelmann left Dresden for Rome in 1758. 2 Through him 
Greek art, which had been forgotten since the Renaissance, was 
once again recognised as a revelation of the Greek spirit not less 
eloquent than literature. A new chapter began when Zoega 3 
made his home in the Eternal City in 1783, and followed the 
example of Winckelmann by joining the Roman Church. Like 
many young students before and after him, the Danish scholar 
dreamed of mastering the whole of Greek literature and antiquity. 
He began by cataloguing collections of coins, proceeded to 
investigate the origin of obelisks, and devoted his later years to 
classical bas-reliefs. Though his last undertaking was interrupted 
by death it is one of the cardinal works of archaeology, its plates 
surpassing all previous reproductions and its text revealing wide 
knowledge of Greek mythology and religion. Though he never 

1 The best summary of classical studies since the Renaissance is in 
Sandys' History of Classical Scholarship, vols. ii. and iii., 1908. For Germany 
see Bursian's monumental Geschichte der classischen Philologie in Deutschland, 
1S83 ; for Holland, Lucian Miiller's Geschichte der klassischen Philologie in 
den Niederlanden, 1869. 

2 See Justi's magnificent monograph, 2nd ed., 1898. 

3 See Welcker, Zoega's Leben, 1819, and the excellent biography in 
A Ugt Deutsche Biog. 



26 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, wrote a popular work, his learning and critical power give him 
II a place beside Winckelmann and Visconti among the founders 
of scientific archaeology. His work and ideas became known 
through his pupil Welcker, who produced a German edition of 
the bas-reliefs, collected his letters, and published a volume of 
his Dissertations. His achievement is to have applied to 
archaeology the strict criticism which had hitherto been con- 
fined to philology. 

While Greek art was being studied and interpreted in Rome, 
a revival of Greek studies was taking place in the German 
Universities. Lectures on classical archaeology were delivered 
by Christ at Leipzig before the middle of the century ; but it 
was above all at Gottingen that the horizon began to widen. 
Gesner surveyed the art and antiquities as well as the literature 
of the ancient world, and instituted the first philological Seminar. 
When Gesner died, the Hanoverian Government invited Ruhnken 
to succeed him. The great Leyden scholar refused, but recom- 
mended Heyne, 1 who had known Winckelmann at Dresden 
and sat at the feet of Christ and Ernesti. His advice was taken, 
and Heyne entered on half a century of fruitful teaching. For 
the first time the whole field of classical life was covered in lectures. 
His archaeological course was based on Winckelmann, and that 
on classical antiquities contained a good deal of historical 
material. Though he produced no first-rate work, lacked exact 
scholarship and outlived himself, his achievement was immense. 
He first seized and revealed classical philology as a whole. 
He founded the historical conception of antiquities and institu- 
tions, mythology and religion. But his greatest work was his 
pupils, of whom it has been calculated that more than three 
hundred became teachers. Among them were Zoega, the 
Schlegels, Thiersch, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Bunsen, Brandis 
and Lachmann. We owe a charming biography of the great 
teacher to his pupil, colleague and son-in-law, Heeren, who 
portrays him as the friend and counsellor of studious youth. 



By far the greatest of Heyne's pupils was the one who owed 
him least. When Wolf 2 entered Gottingen in 1777 at eighteen, he 

1 See Heeren's biography, 181 3. The best appreciation is by Leo, in 
Festschrift z. Feier d. Hundertfunfzigjdhrigen Bestehens d. Gesellschaft d. 
Wissenschaften zu Gottingen, 1901. 

2 There is no satisfactory biography. Mark Pattison's well-known 
essay, Essays, vol. i., 1889, is the best brief sketch. Korte, Leben u. Studien 



WOLF, BOCKH AND OTFRIED MttLLER 27 

was already master of several languages, ancient and modern, and CHAP, 
demanded to be matriculated as a student of Philology. He II 
was told that there were only four faculties — Theology, Law, 
Medicine, and Arts — and that he must enter one of them. He 
persisted, and was inscribed as he desired. But though his wish 
was thus gratified, he was sadly disappointed with Heyne. He 
went to the lectures on the Iliad, but soon ceased to attend 
them. Young as he was, he saw that the Professor was not a 
textual critic, and that his approach to classical literature was 
rather aesthetic than scientific. After two years he left Gottingen, 
and four years later obtained a Chair at Halle at the age of 
twenty-four. 

Wolf's teaching during his twenty-three years' residence 
at HaUe breathed a fnew life into classical study throughout 
Germany. He first conceived classical philology as a science in 
itself. When Wilhelm von Humboldt defined it as ' the know- 
ledge of human nature as exhibited in antiquity,' he summarised 
the interpretation which Wolf had made familiar. His lectures 
were in the highest degree stimulating, and his students repaid 
him by enthusiastic devotion. Goethe came over from Weimar 
to listen to him. Lessing's bust stood in his lecture-room, 
typifying the spirit of critical inquiry. His courses covered every 
department of the classical world — literature, antiquities, geo- 
graphy, art, numismatics, and a general introduction to classical 
study. Several of them were published after his death from 
the notes of his hearers. Though imperfectly reproduced, they 
show his immense knowledge of every province of classical 
learning and modern scholarship, while the clear, pointed com- 
ments help us to imagine the effect they produced. We are not, 
however, solely dependent on the notes of his hearers for our 
knowledge of Wolf's conception of antiquity. When the French 
invasion of 1806 led to the closing of the University and the 
dispersal of the Professors, Goethe urged him to utilise his 
enforced leisure to write. He took the advice, and wrote his 
grand fragment on classical study. 1 He declares that he had felt 
the need of such an outline since he began to lecture in 1783. 
It was his desire to raise the knowledge of antiquity to the 
dignity of a philosophico-historical science. We must avoid 
the mere accumulation of particulars without an idea of the 
spirit which binds them into a whole. This noble essay, 

F. A. Wolfs, 1833, is mediocre. Arnoldt, Wolf in seinem Verhaltnisse zum 
Schulwesen u. zur Pddagogik, 1861-2, deals well with the teacher. Cp. 
Paulsen, Gesch. d. Gelehrten Unterrichts, ii. 208-227, 1897. 
1 Reprinted in Kleine Schriften, 1869. 



28 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, which breathes the same profound veneration for the study of 
II classical antiquity as Niebuhr's ' Letter to a Young Philologist,' 
became an inspiration for teachers and the programme of a 
century's work. 

Wolf's most celebrated work, the ' Prolegomena to Homer,' is 
one of the cardinal books of the modern world. 1 Being asked to 
revise the text of Homer for a new school edition, he intended 
to write a short preface ; but the Introduction grew into a book 
of two hundred pages which was published in 1795. That the 
Homeric poems reached their final form generations if not 
centuries after their 'composition was widely believed by the 
scholars of Alexandria, and was reaffirmed by Perizonius, Vico 
and other modern writers. Robert Wood's striking work on the 
Genius of Homer, published in 1769, was translated into German ; 
and his thesis that writing was unknown till long after the creation 
of the poems became the corner-stone of Wolf's edifice. Villoison's 
edition of a Venetian manuscript of the Iliad, revealing wide 
differences from the commonly received text, confirmed him in 
the conviction that it was the work of several bards. The idea 
of oral transmission came readily to a generation which had 
welcomed Ossian as an echo of the primitive Celtic world. The 
foundation of the Wolfian hypothesis is the absence of writing 
for literary purposes before Solon. Under such conditions the 
composition and transmission of long epics was impossible. 
The Homer that we know is the blending of various poems by 
various authors, probably in the time of Pisistratus. In the 
interval many changes were made by the rhapsodists, and 
further modifications in the taste of the time were introduced 
by the editors. That several of the original songs were by a 
poet named Homer is highly probable. It is Wolf's masterly 
handling of the subject rather than his originality that renders 
his work so memorable. He threw a flood of light not only on 
the origin of the Homeric poems but on the nature of epic poetry 
in general. 

Voss's translation had made Homer familiar, and the 
' Prolegomena ' made a profound sensation throughout Europe. 
There had been nothing like it since Bentley's demolition of the 
Epistles of Phalaris. Ruhnken, to whom as ' the prince of 
critics ' the book was dedicated, was shaken in his belief in the 
unity of the poems, though too old to surrender it. Voss, whose 

1 The best account of the book is in Volkmann, Geschichte u. Kritik d. 
Wolfschen Prolegomena, 1874. Jebb's Homer, 1887, gives a good brief 
sketch. There is a German translation in Reclam's Universal-Bibliothek. 



WOLF, BOCKH AND OTFRIED MtJLLER 29 

judgment carried weight, rejected it. Schiller sarcastically CHAP, 
remarked that each of the seven cities which claimed Homer II 
could now have its piece. Goethe, who at first welcomed the 
idea, afterwards returned to the traditionalist camp. In certain 
quarters there was talk of ' impiety.' On the other hand, 
Wilhelm von Humboldt and the Schlegels, Ilgen and his greater 
pupil Gottfried Hermann welcomed the work as at once con- 
vincing and original, and declared that it would be a canon 
for all future editors. Two influential voices supported its 
conclusions but denied its originality. Herder declared that 
he had always believed Homer to be a constellation and the 
Iliad and Odyssey by different hands, adding that he had long 
ago called attention to the distinction between natural and arti- 
ficial poetry. Heyne went further and accused Wolf of borrow- 
ing his ideas from his old teacher. Wolf was nettled by the 
denial of originality, and stung to anger by the charge of plagiar- 
ism. In a series of Open Letters to Heyne he declared that his 
old master had never hinted the belief which he now avowed. 
It was a moral weakness that Wolf should have been more con- 
cerned to establish his originality, which was less than he claimed, 
than to emphasise the thoroughness and method in which he 
surpassed all his predecessors and critics. Though his central 
contention as to the late use of writing has been overthrown 
and the small Latin volume is now only read by Homeric 
specialists, it contributed more than any other work to launch 
the critical movement which was to raise the nineteenth century 
above its predecessors. 

With the closing of Halle by the French invasion Wolf's 
career as a successful teacher came to an end. Humboldt 
naturally desired to have the greatest living classical scholar 
at the new University of Berlin. But though he occasionally 
lectured, his temper was soured and he had lost the power of 
interesting his hearers. His work was continued by his disciples, 
among whom must be numbered men who were never his pupils 
in an academic sense. 1 Humboldt was directed to Greek studies 
by him, assimilated his view of antiquity and interpreted it to the 
world ; and it was through Humboldt that the spell of the Greek 
world was cast upon Schiller. Goethe's debt was repeatedly 
declared by the poet himself. It was chiefly through the poets 
that the classics passed into the consciousness of the German 
people. 

1 Cp. Lothholz, Das Verkdltniss Wolfs u. W. v. Humboldts zu Goethe u. 
S chill ey, 1863. 



30 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. II 

Wolf's successor in the leadership of Greek studies was his 
pupil Bockh, 1 who combined his master's accuracy of method 
with an interest in speculation which enabled him to enter a 
province to which no philologist before him possessed the key. 
Leaving Halle in 1806, at the age of twenty-one, he became 
Professor of Greek Philology at Heidelberg. To the four years 
at the ancient University on the Neckar he always looked back 
as the golden age of his life. He was conscious of his powers, 
successful as a teacher and surrounded by congenial companions. 
Heidelberg was at that moment the citadel of romanticism. 
The chief teacher of classical antiquity was Creuzer, whom he 
described fifty years later as ' my benefactor ' ; and among his 
close friends were Brentano, Arnim and Gorres. During his 
residence he published studies on Plato and the tragedians, and 
began his work on Pindar's metres which rendered the poet 
intelligible to the modern world. He followed the precedent set 
by Wolf in delivering an encyclopaedic course. His fame spread 
rapidly, and in 1810 he migrated to the new University which 
he was to adorn for fifty-six years and with which his name is 
more inseparably connected than that of any of the illustrious 
men who have taught within its walls. He was not a great 
lecturer ; but when his hearers became used to his methods, they 
learned to enjoy them in no ordinary degree. While covering 
the whole field of classical philology in detailed surveys, his 
general course exerted perhaps the widest influence. His notes 
for the course, delivered twenty-six times, were in continual 
process of growth, and a full and reliable version of these cele- 
brated lectures was published after his death. 3 While gratefully 
recognising the genius of his master, he considered that Wolf's 
lectures were too atomic, the different departments of study 
being insufficiently correlated. After explaining that an ency- 
clopaedia must be a whole, not an aggregate, he proceeded to 
review chronology, life, trade, religion, science, literature and 
philosophy. The book is still one of the surest guides to the 
serious study of classical antiquity. 

The early years at Berlin were chiefly devoted to the study of 
the economic life of Greece, which had been almost entirely 
neglected. He composed a dissertation on the Silver Mines 

1 Max Hoffmann's August Bockh, 1901, contains an admirable bio- 
graphy and copious correspondence. The best brief sketch is the lecture 
by Stark in his Vortrdge u. Aufsdtze, 1880. 

2 Encycl. d. philologischen Wissenschaften, 1877. 



WOLF, BOCKH and otfried MVLLER 31 

of Laurium for the Academy, and in 181 7 published his greatest CHAP. 
work, ' The Public Economy of Athens.' Revised in 185 1, and -"■* 
appearing in a third and enlarged edition in 1886, the centenary 
of the author's birth, the book remains indispensable. Unlike 
Niebuhr, he advances step by step, securing his conquests against 
a flank attack. It is the only German historical work written 
before the appearance of Ranke which has not been superseded 
and remains in constant use. Dedicated to Niebuhr, it achieved 
for Athens the resurrection which Niebuhr had accomplished for 
Rome. It was Bockh's supreme achievement to transform 
classical philology into an historical science. The preface declared 
that the science of Hellenic Antiquities was still in its infancy. A 
survey of the whole field was the more necessary as most students 
were engaged in minute philological researches. The immense 
achievements of Athens were only rendered possible by physical 
force, which in its turn rested on the public and private economy 
of the State. By the end of the Persian war the financial system 
was fully developed, while the Macedonian conquest involved 
new arrangements. It is of the intervening period that the book 
gives a detailed description. 

The money needed for the public service, and the relation of 
taxation to the means of the people could not be ascertained 
without knowing the prices of articles and the wages of labour, 
for which the evidence is scanty. Investigation follows into the 
quantity of money in circulation, and into the gradually in- 
creasing supply of the precious metals. The prices of land, 
mines, houses, slaves, cattle, clothes and food are examined, 
and the conclusion is reached that the necessaries of life were 
cheap and wages low, owing to the presence of slave labour and 
resident aliens. A discussion follows of the public expenditure 
and its objects — defence, the civil service, the assemblies, police, 
the administration of justice, buildings, religion, the celebration 
of festivals, and the poor. In addition to these regular charges, 
frequent wars exercised a disturbing influence. The ordinary 
revenues were derived from State property, mines, customs, 
poll-taxes, legal fees, fines and confiscation, supplemented by 
tribute from allies. Extra revenues, necessitated by wars, 
were obtained from a special property tax, an arbitrary impost, 
or loans. Bockh begins and ends his work with a warning not 
to regard the Greeks as wiser or better than ourselves. Their 
pecuniary dealings were by no means free from stain. Statesmen 
were always trying to discover some method by which the mass 
of the people might be supported out of the public revenues rather 
than by individual industry. Far too much was spent on soldiers' 



32 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, pay ; foreign possessions were maladministered ; allies were 
II oppressed. Depravity and moral corruption were rampant 
even in the most brilliant period of the most brilliant State. 
' The Greeks, with all the perfection of their art and the freedom 
of their government, were more unhappy than is commonly 
believed. Even in the times of their glory they bore within 
themselves the seeds of that destruction which was to befall 
them.' 

' The Public Economy of Athens ' first made known to the 
modern world the daily life of a state of antiquity. From a mass 
of isolated indications Bockh constructed a finished picture. 
His approach was historical, not aesthetic, his sole aim an objec- 
tive reconstruction of a vanished world. The achievement, like 
that of Winckelmann, opened up new vistas. The whole econo- 
mic organism of the Athenian State stood revealed, and a realistic 
view of Greek civilisation became for the first time possible. 
Though he was accused of confusing wealth with the precious 
metals, and his estimate of population was challenged, no one 
has ever contested his right to rank as the author of the first work 
of a scientific character on the history of Greece. Twenty 
years later he published a volume, which may be regarded as a 
continuation, on the Weights and Measures of Antiquity. In 
studying the collection of coins in the Berlin Museum he had 
discovered an unexpected connection between different lands. The 
book discusses in detail a range of subjects only hinted at in the 
earlier work, and embraces the whole of the ancient world. Like 
all his writings it combines an infinite capacity for minute 
investigation with a wide vision and illuminating generalisa- 
tions. His survey of the weights, measures and coinage of 
Greece, Italy, Sicily, Egypt, Palestine, Phoenicia and Babylonia 
not only founded comparative metrology, but revealed the 
relations of the nations from the Tiber to the Euphrates and the 
unity of the civilisation of the Mediterranean states. His exact 
and careful scholarship may be judged by comparing the work 
with Heeren's treatise on the trade and commerce of antiquity. 
Two years later he utilised the discovery of some inscriptions to 
explain the nature and administration of the Athenian marine. 

In writing ' The Public Economy of Athens ' he had found one 
of his most valuable sources in inscriptions. The Berlin Academy 
had been reorganised by the Humboldts about the same time 
as the foundation of the University, with which it has ever since 
worked in the closest relation. Bockh believed that its object 
was to carry out undertakings too large for the strength or 
resources of individual scholars ; and several joint enterprises 



WOLF, BOCKH AND OTFRIED MULLER 33 

were set on foot. Of these by far the most important was the CHAP. 
plan of a collection of Greek Inscriptions. Inscriptions in the II 
Near East had been copied by travellers from Cyriac of Ancona 
in the fifteenth century onwards ; but the number was small, 
and the collections of Gruter and his successors were chiefly 
Latin. Authentic records were often imperfectly copied, and 
forgeries were common. Fourmont, sent by the Academy of 
Inscriptions to Greece, falsified much that he found, destroying 
or burying the originals to prevent discovery. The emissaries of 
the Society of Dilettanti were more conscientious. But no 
Eckhel arose to sift the grain from the chaff, and to render the 
inscriptions scattered through innumerable publications available 
for the needs of scholarship. It was therefore a happy inspiration 
which led Bockh in 1815 to propose a Corpus of the inscriptions 
of antiquity, beginning with those in the Greek language. Funds 
were granted in the expectation that the enterprise would be 
finished in four years, and fill a large volume or two small ones. 
Neither Bockh nor the Academy realised the magnitude of their 
undertaking. The work is still in progress, and has cost more 
than ten times the sum originally allotted. But in undertaking 
the task the Academy rendered the greatest service to the study 
of Greece that it has ever received. In the legacy of the ancients 
the inscriptions are of scarcely less significance than their build- 
ings, their sculpture and their writings. They shed new light 
on familiar subjects and illuminate tracts of territory on which 
rays shine from no other quarter. 

The limit was fixed at the foundation of the Eastern Empire, 
and a Commission was appointed to carry out the enterprise 
under Bockh's direction. The main object was to collect, 
classify and explain the inscriptions already known. Though the 
dispatch of scholars to verify the originals and to discover new 
material was discussed, it was not put in the forefront of the 
programme. The main burden of the vast enterprise fell on the 
editor, his colleagues, except Bekker, who was sent to Paris and 
London, rendering but little assistance. In 1825 the first part 
appeared, and in 1828 the first volume was complete. He 
arranged his inscriptions, as Eckhel his coins, geographically ; 
and his choice was generally approved. But the scholarship of 
the volume was sharply attacked by Gottfried Hermann, 1 who 
carried on the English and Dutch tradition of pure philology. 
Like everybody else, he declared he had looked forward to the 

1 Vber Bockh's Behandlung d. Griechischen Inschriften, 1826. For 
Hermann see Kochly, Gottfried Hermann, 1874, and Jahn's address in his 
Biographische Aufsdtze, 1866. 



34 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, edition ; but his expectations were disappointed. He proceeded 
11 to accuse Bockh of misreading a large number of inscriptions, 
and declared that no part of the work could be accepted without 
verification. 

Bockh was naturally annoyed at this wholesale condemnation, 
and vigorously defended himself. i There was nothing useful, he 
contended, in the criticism except suggestions as to readings, 
which, however, must always remain uncertain. ' I have studied 
inscriptions for man}? years,' he added, ' and he has not.' Her- 
mann replied, and the pupils of the protagonists entered the 
field. The warfare indeed was not only between two scholars 
but between rival schools. The Leipzig Professor believed 
linguistic studies to be the kernel of philology, for other problems 
could only be approached through linguistic interpretation. 
He knew and cared little for the politics and art, religion and 
philosophy of the ancient world. He had no conception of 
historical development. With such ideas it was natural that 
he should regard Bockh and his pupils as endangering philology 
by subordinating it to other studies, and that he should exaggerate 
the importance of mistakes. It was not till twenty years had 
elapsed that the veteran leaders of the rival schools renewed 
the friendly relations of their early days. The Corpus, being 
partially based on copies by untrained hands, was not 
a perfect work ; and many of Hermann's criticisms were well 
founded. Some of the inscriptions Bockh failed to understand. 
The epoch-making work of his pupil Kirchhoff on the Greek 
alphabet has rendered it possible to date and locate many 
records which appeared to offer no clue. The cardinal importance 
of copying from the original has come to be recognised. More- 
over, the opening up of Greece and the Near East and the labours 
of scholars of every country have enormously increased the 
number of inscriptions. Nevertheless much of Bockh's epigraphic 
work was of an enduring character, and none of his contem- 
poraries could have done it so well. When the second volume 
appeared in 1843 he handed over the editorship to younger 
men, while continuing to render occasional assistance. The 
third and fourth volumes, which owed much to Curtius and 
Kirchhoff, were completed by|i859, tne entire work containing 
10,000 entries. 

The main occupation of the great scholar's later life was 

chronology. The Moon Cycles, like the Metrology, showed that 

his vision swept over the whole of the ancient world. And while 

his profound dissertations widened the boundaries of knowledge, 

1 Kleine Schriften, vol. vii., 1872. 



WOLF, BOCKH AND OTFRIED MttLLER 35 

his innumerable addresses on ceremonial occasions held aloft CHAP, 
the ideal of accurate and disinterested scholarship.! By his II 
patriarchal age, his immense range and the almost infinite 
number of his pupils Bockh occupies a position in regard to 
classical studies similar to that of Ranke in the history of modern 
Europe. 

Ill 

Bockh's principles were carried far and wide by the genera- 
tions who sat at his feet. The pupil who was dearest to his 
heart, who owed most to him and paid his debt most fully was 
Otfried Miiller. 2 The young Silesian attracted attention even 
in his school-days by the facility with which he learned the 
classical languages and wrote Latin and Greek verses. At 
Breslau he plunged into the study of philosophy and ancient 
history. The precocious youth came to Berlin and entered 
the lecture-room of Bockh in 1815, at the age of eighteen. The 
choice between the literary and the historical approach to 
antiquity had been made before he left Breslau ; but he was 
confirmed in his decision by his new teacher. Mythology 
already interested him more than any other department of 
study. His knowledge was the amazement of his teachers and 
comrades, and the thought of a history of Greece now took root 
in his mind. 

At the age of nineteen Miiller terminated his University life 
and entered on his career of authorship by his Doctor's thesis 
on iEgina. This wonderful monograph, which traced the history 
of the island to the Frankish conquest, was dedicated to Bockh ; 
and the delighted master rewarded him by a glowing review in 
which he emphasised the insight and completeness of the work. 3 
It was the first special history of a Greek state, and it opened a 
new era by its attention to culture. Curtius was later to compare 
the first production of his beloved master to Justus Moser's 
history of Osnabrtick. The foundation was laid by an examina- 
tion of the topography, followed by a study of race, religion, 
antiquities, sea-power, trade, art and government. Many 
passages revealed a knowledge that went far beyond his subject. 

1 They are collected in his Kleine Schriften. 

' The best accounts are by K. Dilthey, Otfried Miiller, 1898, and 
Curtius in Altertum u. Gegenwart, vol. ii., 1882. R. Forster's Rede, 1897, 
is also useful. Liicke's Erinnerungen an Miiller, 1841, are the testimony of a 
friend and colleague. Kern's Lebensbild in Briefen, 1908, is of value for 
his personality. 

:i Reprinted in Kleine Schri ten, vol. vii., 1872. 

D 2 



36 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. ' If he goes on with similar contributions,' wrote Bockh, ' we 
II shall have a history of the Greeks of which till now there has 
been no conception.' The master realised in a flash that the 
pupil had become a colleague. The correspondence which now 
began is of the highest value, not only for the life and studies of 
the friends but also because it enshrines the noblest ideals of 
German scholarship. 1 ' You gave me the idea of a true philology,' 
writes the pupil, ' and I still feel in the same relation to you as of 
old.' When Miiller in the preface to ' The Dorians ' declared that 
he could not say how much of Bockh had gone into the book, 
the master replied, ' If I have been anything to you, you have 
more than repaid it, and I am in your debt. But we will leave 
this striking of balances. May the unquenchable striving for 
truth strengthen the bond by which we are united.' The two 
men completed each other, each possessing precious qualities 
that the other lacked. Bockh was a realist, suspicious of moun- 
tain paths where the foothold was hazardous. Miiller was a 
creative and original mind, fascinated by speculative problems 
and revelling in daring generalisations. It was precisely the 
relationship of Stubbs and Green. 

While every part of the history of iEgina was carefully studied, 
it was the twilight before the Persian wars that attracted him 
most. Miiller looks down in spirit on the island from the 
Athenian mainland. This faculty of compelling nature to throw 
light on primitive history was new in Greek study, and was one of 
the elements which he added to the legacy of his master. Here, 
too, we find his notion of the origin of the Greek people, and here 
the beloved Dorians are favoured at the expense of the enemy 
at Athens. Here also by his use of coins and monuments he 
reaps the first-fruits of the archaeological labours which were 
to fill so much of his life. He determined to carry on his investi- 
gations, and within a year a volume on Orchomenos and the 
Minyse was ready. Like its predecessor it began with a full 
description of the country drawn from the records of travellers. 
proceeded to discuss the legends of origin and colonisation, and 
sketched the art and culture. It appeared as the first pail of a 
' History of Hellenic Races and Cities,' and was to prepare the 
wa3^ for a history of Greece. He had discovered the greatness 
of the JEolic Minyse and traced their wanderings in the port of 
Iolkus, where their memories were preserved in the legend of the 
Argonauts, in Thessalv and Bceotia, in Laconia and the Islands 
and C}Tene. His guide is the local legend, and he believed, like 
Niebuhr, that the historical might be winnowed from the mythical. 
1 Bockh u. Miiller im Brief wechsel, iSS3- 



WOLF, BOCKH AND OTFRIED MVLLER 37 

But his method carried him, as it carried Niebuhr, further than CHAP, 
subsequent scholars could approve. Bockh remarked that II 
though he agreed with the chief results, the subject itself was too 
vague to be thoroughly cleared up. ' It is a slippery path,' 
he wrote, ' that of mythology, which you are following. A holy 
tear keeps me from springing over the wall, though I like some- 
times to peep through a slit.' At the same moment Muller's 
friend Buttmann was endeavouring to show that the Minyae 
were as mythical as the Centaurs. His criticism of the value of 
the legends of their colonisation and relationships was more 
accurate than Muller's, but half a century later Schliemann was 
to establish the reality of Orchomenos as a contemporary of 
Tiryns and Mycenae. 

Before the book was published Muller was appointed Professor 
at Gottingen. When Welcker left for Bonn in 1819, Heeren, who 
managed the University, asked Bockh if he would approve the 
appointment. Bockh replied that he was the model of a scholar, 
and that he had never seen such modesty in a young man nor such 
a fine moral sense. Though he was only just of age, he was fully 
competent to take the post. During his early years at Gottingen 
Muller laboured steadily at the Greek races and states. In 1824 
appeared ' The Dorians,' the work which first made his name widely 
known. The volumes, for which Bockh sent him the relevant 
inscriptions, dealt for the first time with a people who played a 
leading part in Greek history. ' I try to seize the essence of the 
Dorian stock, as of a man, by its doings,' he wrote ; but it is 
dangerous to personify a race. The Dorians, Ionians and 
iEolians were not so different as he believed. Such differences 
as existed arose far more from their fortunes and their homes than 
from innate qualities ; and he underestimated the degree of 
unity achieved by centuries of intercourse. Again he errs in his 
excessive admiration for the Dorian stock, in which he saw the 
true Hellenism. He was fascinated by the ' noble simplicity ' 
of Sparta, the reverence for tradition, the lofty ideal of woman- 
hood. Yet despite its obvious faults, the influence of the book 
was healthy. It was the first example of a comprehensive sum- 
mary of a race in its inner development as well as its outward 
fortunes, carried out with a wealth of knowledge and a breadth 
of vision that has never been surpassed. While Bockh only laid 
the foundation for a history of Athens, Muller wrote the first 
important work of actual Greek history. 

The ' Minyae ' and the ' Dorians ' were both praised and cen- 
sured for their bold handling of the problems of mythology ; and 
it was in reply to the attacks on the latter work that he wrote 



38 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, his ' Prolegomena to the Study of Mythology.' He had already 
II defined his general attitude in reviews of Creuzer and Voss. 1 In 
discussing the Symbolik, he had expressed his gratitude to the man 
who had raised the science to the height at which it stood ; but 
the idea that priests clothed religious ideas in symbols of which 
the key was lost he dismisses as nonsense. In regard to Greece he 
declared that he could hardly read a page without disagreement, 
and he totally rejects the elaborate dogmatic system which 
Creuzer builds up out of the myths. On the other hand he refuses 
to adopt the negative conclusions of Voss, who declared that the 
Mysteries possessed no secrets, and that they merely dealt with 
fables of the birth, loves and quarrels of the gods. He refused 
to admit that they had no symbolic or allegorical meaning, or 
that the universal testimony to their sacredness was groundless. 
The middle position assumed by Miiller in the bitter controversy 
between Creuzer and Voss, and maintained when Lobeck restated 
the negative conclusions of the latter with immensely greater 
learning, afforded a steadying influence in the early years of the 
new science. The little volume, written with great clearness and 
power, was the first attempt at a systematic discussion of the 
methods and aims of mythological study, and pointed the direction 
in which research was to travel. Rejecting Creuzer's far-fetched 
habit of seeking for Oriental origins, he turns to the locality in 
which each myth originated or with which it was most closely 
associated. Neither Creuzer nor Voss, he declared, understood 
the essence of myth, which was, in fact, the oldest poetry of a 
people, the creation of the folk-soul, the original form of its 
reflection and observation. The conception had been advanced 
by Herder, and was soon to be applied by Jacob Grimm to the 
Teutonic races. Miiller's chief interest lay in the study of local 
myths, legends of migrations and the relations of local cults. 
But he was wrong in believing that there was no myth without 
its locality ; and his race gods, such as the Dorian Apollo, 
sometimes lacked accuracy of attribution. 

An important part of his duty at Gottingen was to teach 
archaeology. Heyne's lectures had created a demand, which 
Welcker, with his intimate knowledge of Italy, had developed. 
Surrounded by engravings and plaster casts he seemed to bring 
the ancient world to life. With his love of beauty he seized the 

1 Reprinted in Kleine Deutsche Schriften, 1847-8. The best account of 
Creuzer is in Stark, Vortrdge u. Aufsdtze, 1880. Cp. his autobiography, 
A us dem Leben eines alten Professors, 1848. For Voss we have Herbst's 
great biography, /. H. Voss, 1872-6. The best sketch of Lobeck is in 
Lehrs, Populdre Aufsdtze, 1875. 



WOLF, BOCKH AND OTFRIED MttLLER 39 

significance of the object before him, and restored its geographical CHAP. 
and historical environment. He believed Greek art, like Greek II 
religion, to have sprung up spontaneously. He lived long enough 
to learn from Bockh of the frequent intercourse of the nations, 
and excavations were to reveal foreign influences. But he went 
less astray than Creuzer, who transformed the Greeks into 
a debtor nation. His lectures and researches found permanent 
form in his ' Handbook of the Archaeology of Art,' a work of 
scarcely less importance in the history of Greek studies than ' The 
Public Economy of Athens.' It was the creation of a new 
discipline, the first guide to a subject of enormous magnitude 
and uncertain frontiers. One of his conspicuous gifts was the 
power to reduce vast masses of material to order and symmetry. 
Rewritten a few years later by the author, revised in 1847 by 
Welcker and reprinted in 1878, the Handbook has been the guide 
and companion of generations of students. The work suffers 
from Muller's usual fault of overstating the independence of 
Greece ; but subject to this correction it provided a no less 
trustworthy than briUiant survey of the whole artistic evolution. 
In 1832 he supplemented it by his ' Monuments of Ancient Art,' 
for which he chose the plates and wrote the text. His minor 
works on archaeology fill five volumes. No German since Winckel- 
mann had done so much to make Greek art a living element in 
classical study. 

While Muller was believed to be wholly engrossed in mythology 
and archaeology, he surprised the world by the publication of a 
work on the Etruscans, whose history Niebuhr pronounced the 
most obscure in all antiquity. With the marvellous synthetic 
power which distinguished him he reconstructed the civilisation 
of a people whom he believed to be immigrants from the 
East. Applying his usual method, he examined the natural 
features of the country, surveyed every aspect of the public and 
private life of the State — history and government, industry, 
religion and art, science and manners. Despite Niebuhr's 
contention that some of his ideas had been appropriated, the work 
is highly original. Half a century later the work was reprinted 
by Deecke, who declared its art so wonderful that it was a duty 
to revive the book. Despite the immense accession of knowledge 
from the excavation of the cities and cemeteries of Etruria, 
it is still of value, and will not be wholly superseded till the 
key to the Etruscan language is found. 

During the later years of his short life Muller worked at a 
popular history of Greek literature, which he brought down to 
the fifth century, and which, both in German and Italian, French 



40 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

and English dress, enjoyed a wide and lasting popularity. But 
his youthful dream of a history of Greece had never ceased to 
haunt him, and with his fortieth year he felt it was time to begin. 
There was only one more indispensable preliminary. In the 
request for a year's leave he wrote : ' From the beginning of my 
publications I have always contemplated a systematic and 
detailed history of Greece. I have given twenty years to studies 
directed to this end. I am now as ripe for the task as I ever 
can be, and I must begin soon if I am not to be too late. I need 
a knowledge of the places, in order to compare and revise the 
results of my own geographical and topographical studies with 
the reality. A few months in Greece would be of incomparable 
value for my whole life.' The country had been first systemati- 
cally studied by Stuart and Revett in the middle of the eighteenth 
century, and their work was continued by Leake, the Pausanias 
of modern Greece, whose priceless topographical writings appeared 
during the formative period of Muller's life. 1 When it was 
suggested to Bockh that he ought to visit Greece, he replied with 
a smile that he knew what it looked like. Muller, on the other 
hand, though he boasted that he would need no guide in Athens, 
fully recognised the importance of a personal acquaintance with 
the country and its monuments. He contemplated not less than 
twelve volumes, half narrative, the other half notes, proofs and 
dissertations, depicting the complete historic life of the Greek 
people. What the '.Dorians' did for a single stock was to be 
essayed, with matured power and ampler knowledge, for the 
whole race. The request was granted, and after a prolonged 
stay in Rome, he reached Athens in 1840, where he was met by his 
pupil Curtius, in whose letters 3 we follow the closing weeks of his 
life. After a vigorous onslaught on the capital and the Pelopon- 
nesus, Thebes and Orchomenus, fever struck him down at 
Delphi, and he was carried back to Athens to die. His death 
was the greatest loss that Greek studies sustained during the 
nineteenth century. In the eloquent words of Curtius, ' He 
fell a martyr in the land of his spirit, like a hero on his shield, 
in the fulfilment of his calling and in the preparation of greater, 
riper works.' His colleague Liicke described him as the most 
lovable and harmonious personality he had ever met. Unlike 
his master Bockh and his pupil Curtius, he possessed a touch of 
genius. He is the Shelley of the modern renaissance, the young 
Apollo in the historical pantheon. 

1 The best summary of Leake's life and work is in Curtius, A liertum u. 
Gegenwart, vol. ii., 1882. 

2 Ernst Curtius, Ein Lebensbild in Briefen, 1903. 



WOLF, BOCKH and otfried mVller 41 

The labours of Bockh and Otfried Muller in reconstructing CHAP, 
the history and civilisation of Greece were ably seconded by a H 
band of zealous scholars. Welcker 1 devoted a long and fruitful 
life to the study and co-ordination of Greek art, literature and 
religion. Gerhard threw light on many departments of archaeo- 
logy. Meier and Schomann explored the legal institutions of 
Athens. Ritter and Brandis wrote the first scholarly histories 
of Greek philosophy, while Hegel traced the dialectic process 
of development. Aided by Wolf and Bockh, Ideler, at once an 
astronomer and a philologist, reconstituted the chronology of 
the ancient world. In every direction the opening decades of the 
century witnessed a new and deeper insight into the life and 
thought of the mother of European culture. 

1 Kekule, Das Leben Welcker' s, 1880, is one of the best biographies of a 
classical scholar. 



CHAPTER III 

EICHHORN AND SAVIGNY 



CHAP. The treatment of law and institutions may be speculative or 
m experimental, absolute or relative. 1 The former sets up a system 
in conformity with the ideal formed by reason ; the latter studies 
legal principles and methods in relation to the social needs from 
which they spring. The eighteenth century was dominated by 
the philosophic conception, the nineteenth by the historical. 
The transition occurred during the same wonderful years which 
witnessed the renaissance of Greek and Roman studies. While 
the new era of classical research is connected with Berlin, the 
historical study of jurisprudence is identified with Gottingen. 
Though Gesner and Heyne made the Hanoverian foundation the 
centre of philological studies for half a century, the political 
and historical sciences had always been strongly represented. 
Putter in German law, Martens in International law, Spittler, 
Schlozer, Gatterer in history, Achenwall in statistics, formed a 
galaxy of which no other seat of learning could boast. Of 
Putter, the teacher of Hardenberg and innumerable statesmen 
and officials, Gottingen was specially proud. It was his method 
in his lectures and his writings to explain current law by German 
history. But though he saw, as Montesquieu had seen, that 
law could only be understood by reference to the past, it did not 
occur to him to regard it as itself an expression of the national life. 
The distinction of being the founder of the historical school of 
jurisprudence belongs not to him but to one of his pupils. 

Hugo first realised that the law of a people could only be 
understood through the national life itself, since it was itself a 

1 The whole field surveyed in this chapter is covered by the later 
volumes of Landsberg's monumental Geschichte der deutschen Rechtswissen- 
schaft, and by Gierke's masterly address, Die historische Rechtsschule u. die 
Germanisten, 1903. 



EICHHORX AND SAVIGNY 43 

part and expression of that life. 1 This fruitful conception dawned CHAP. 
on him about the time that he became Professor at Gottingen in HI 

and is clearly expressed in the preface which he wrote in the 
following year to a translation of Gibbon's chapter on Roman 
law. ' Roman law is splendid when we study it without any 
thought of our own customs, constitution and religion ; when one 
simply learns to know the Romans themselves and to observe 
how their law developed, and then thinks of what is happening 
now among ourselves, and reflects why it was that men, who 
were at bottom like ourselves, were in many ways so different 
in their doings and arrangements. ' He went on to say that though 
Gibbon came nearest this ideal, it had never been completely 
realised. Nor was it his good fortune to realise it himself. 
History, he declared, must be studied not to illustrate but to 
discover principles. Natural law must give place to historical 
law. But he never embodied these fruitful ideas in a work of any 
magnitude. He lacked style, his text-books were dry and for- 
bidding, and while still a middle-aged man he saw hi m self passed 
in the race. 

. While Hugo pointed out the road, it was the glory of his 
greatest pupil to be the hrst to travel along it. The early life 
of Karl Friedrich Eichhorn, 2 son of the great Orientalist, was 
passed in an atmosphere of learning. like most other students 
at Gottingen he studied law, political science and history. On 
nnishing his University career he determined to see the machine/; 
of the Empire at work, and with this object visited Wetzlar, 
I -rnsburg and Vienna. It had been bis intention to become 
a practical jurist ; but soon after his return he accepted a chair 
at Frankfort on the Oder. The first volume of his History of 
German Law and Institutions appeared in 1808, when the author 
twenty-seven. 'If I had had guidance/ wrote Eichhorn 
in 182 S, ' I should have learned more in one year than I did in ten. 
If I had been told that all understanding of law rested on historical 
perception, I should have arranged my studies correctly- ten years 
re I found the right way by my own groping.' This passage 
appears to contradict utterances in which the historian ackn:" - 
ledges a deep debt to his teachers. The explanation is that he 
only grasped the real tendency of Hugo's teaching when his student 

: The most authoritative account of Hugo is in Savigny s Verw ri s ch i e 

-....-. in 1S3S on the jubilee of his doctorate. Cp. 
Mejer 5 essay in his £ g .phisches, 1 : 

■ -_; standaxd monograph is bv the great canonist, Schulte, 1S84- 
Frensdorif s article in A Bg. I etttst he Biog. is excellent, LSrsch, Briefs von 
1881 gives a selection of letb 



44 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, days were over. He had learned from him the necessity of the 
HI historical study of law ; but he had heard nothing but Roman 
law from his lips. Putter connected law with the history of the 
state, Eichhorn with the life of the nation. 

Eichhorn brought to his task an intensity of national feeling 
which none of his teachers had possessed. His interest in public 
affairs had been aroused by the French Revolution, and the terrible 
events of 1806 stirred him, as they stirred Niebuhr, to his depths. 
He resolved to dedicate himself to the redemption of Germany by 
teaching his students to love their country and its history. It 
was in this spirit of constructive patriotism that he wrote the 
first volume of his celebrated work. The preface declares that 
now, when the constitution of the Empire was in a state of violent 
transition, it was more important than ever to look back at the 
past, and to seize its relation to the present. His task was to 
bring order into the mass of material which had been collected, 
to pass beyond the labyrinth of errors and hypotheses to the 
sources themselves. His ambition was not to discuss legal 
antiquities, but to construct a sure foundation for existing 
institutions and ideas by means of a history of the State and of 
public law. The novelty of the plan was not more remarkable 
than the success with which it was carried out. In a letter from 
Savigny, when Eichhorn's broken health led him to take a gloomy 
view of things, that consummate scholar used these words : 
' You call me happy in comparison with yourself as a master of 
Roman law. Then listen to the simple truth. If I have any 
merit it lies in my having followed the way already mapped out. 
But how is it with you ? You have opened the way in German 
law without a forerunner, and given this science a wholly new 
life by speech and pen.' Savigny's judgment is the testimony 
not only of an affectionate friend, but of impartial posterity. 
Eichhorn inaugurated a new era not less decisively than Niebuhr. 
If he did not reveal such lofty intellectual power, the foundations 
were more secure. 

Eichhorn found on the one hand collections of laws and 
documents, on the other text -books for the use of practitioners. 
There was rich material for the Empire, for the separate States, 
for the Church, for the classes ; but it had never been critically 
examined or wrought into a coherent whole. The history of 
German Public Law was chiefly a story of dynasties, wars, 
and territorial changes. Emphasis was laid neither on its 
development nor on its character as an expression of national 
life. In political history he had tolerable guides ; but in the 
realm of institutions and of public and private law he had to find 



EICHHORN AND SAVIGNY 45 

his own way. Realising that certain elements of current German CHAP, 
law grew from Roman or ecclesiastical soil, he included foreign m 
systems in his survey. Law was presented as the product of all 
the factors that influence the life of a nation. Though it was 
impossible for a single man to tell the whole story from the 
sources, he performed his task with a power which ranks him 
among the founders of historical science. He traced the con- 
nection between the legal ideas and institutions of different ages, 
and revealed the continuity of evolution. No jurist and few 
historians contributed so powerfully to the awakening and foster- 
ing of the spirit of nationality. The value of the work was 
immediately recognised. Its sale was enormous, and from its 
appearance the history of German law became an indispensable 
part of the training of students of jurisprudence. The highest 
compliment it received was an invitation to the new University 
of Berlin. No sooner was he installed than the War of Libera- 
tion commenced. He was one of the earliest volunteers, fighting 
at Leipzig, entering Paris with the Allies, and winning the Iron 
Cross. In later life the consciousness of having shared in the 
liberation of his country was more precious to him than his im- 
mense reputation. It stamped his work with the seal of personal 
sacrifice, and emphasised his position as the teacher of a living 
patriotism. When the restriction of academic freedom in 
Prussia during the years of reaction became irksome, he accepted 
an invitation to return to his own University. It was during the 
twelve years at Gottingen that he reached the highest point of 
his professorial fame ; and his lectures were often attended by 
300 students. 

In addition to his main achievement Eichhorn wrote a 
treatise on Private Law, which may be regarded as a supplement 
to the History ; for in dealing with inheritance, serfdom and the 
family, the principles of the historical school are fearlessly applied. 
In 1829 he was compelled by ill-health to resign his chair ; but 
he retained strength to write a third important work on ecclesias- 
tical law. Like the Privatrecht the new treatise was an elabora- 
tion of the brief discussion in the author's main work. The 
discussion of Protestant law, hitherto utterly neglected, occupies 
only a part of the massive work. Half a volume is devoted to pro- 
legomena, describing the officers of the Church, the Primacy, the 
decretals, the relations of Church and State and of Catholics and 
Protestants. This sketch of Church history from the legal and 
institutional point of view was of great value, being written with 
a deeper knowledge of law than historians possessed and a larger 
knowledge of ecclesiastical history than lawyers could claim. 



46 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. The objective spirit in which the Roman Church was treated 
HI was a refreshing novelty. ' I am a Protestant by inner conviction,' 
he wrote, ' but I am without any hostile feeling to the Catholic 
Church and its adherents.' He respected it as a great historical 
phenomenon and a valuable conservative force. The treatise 
exerted a profound influence on the teachers and students of 
ecclesiastical law, not least on the handbook of Richter by which 
it was superseded. The author declared it to be his ripest work, 
and' such a consummate judge as his pupil and biographer 
^cdiulte has confirmed the opinion. 

Eichhorn's later life was occupied with state business, and 
produced no literary work except occasional essays and the 
revision of his earlier writings. He shared the fate of pioneers in 
seeing the unquestioning acceptance of his authority yield to 
criticism and challenge. The steady demand for his History en- 
abled him to keep it up to date. He was conscious of the short- 
comings of the first volume and, after revising it twice, virtually 
rewrote it for the fourth edition in 1834. Even then he declared 
it to be the weakest part of the work, though he profited by 
Jacob Grimm's study of legal antiquities. He declared that 
the study of the codes, the capitularies and the formulas must 
be pursued for a long time before anyone could flatter himself 
that he really understood the early Middle Ages. On returning 
thanks for his reception into the Berlin Academy in 1839 ne 
modestly declared : ' I only venture to regard my work as useful 
in so far as it has perhaps contributed to win for these studies 
new friends.' For a time it seemed sufficient to fill up the gaps 
that the master had left and to follow the lines of research which 
he had opened up. Later it became clear that there were faults 
of construction as well as of detail. His view of the Roman 
. origin of towns was unfounded. He had not realised the full 
\^ measure of difference among the Teutonic peoples, nor did he 
afford adequate recognition to the law which was practised but 
not written. In some cases, moreover, he generalised too boldly 
from local and temporary phenomena. But these faults scarcely 
diminish the enduring significance of his achievement. All 
Germany expressed its gratitude on the occasion of his jubilee 
in 1851. ' We jurists,' declared Wilda, ' whatever branches of 
jurisprudence we have especially studied, whether we have been 
your hearers or have otherwise benefited by the fruits of your 
labours, revere you as our great teacher and master. But your 
achievements do not belong to scholarship alone. The quickening 
of the study of German law is a national deed of far-reaching 
importance. Time will emphasise this more and more. Universal 



EICHHORN AND SAVIGNY 47 

reverence will be paid to the name of the man who fought for CHAP, 
the freedom of his fatherland and revealed its identity to the III 
German people.' The prophecy has proved correct. ' His 
book,' wrote Schulte in 1884, ' is still unapproached, still less 
rivalled.' Since then the early part has been superseded by the 
monumental work of Brunner ; but no complete and detailed 
history has yet been written. 

Eichhorn bequeathed to scholarship a method and a model ; 
but the world of ideas in which he lived has passed away. The 
reverence for the past which he shared with Niebuhr and Savigny 
grew into an obstructive conservatism which provoked a revolt 
against the historical school. A strong monarchy, rooted in the 
respect and affection of the people, was his ideal, and it never 
occurred to him that a more advanced political education brought 
with it the need for a different set of political forms. While 
the strength of the historical school consisted in its recognition 
of the continuity of history, its danger lay in the temptation to 
hamper the creative energies of the present. 



II 

If Eichhorn gave the first consummate example of the his- 
torical treatment of law, it is to his life-long friend that we owe 
the fullest explanation and the most brilliant defence of the 
method itself. Losing his parents while still a child, Savigny 1 
became the ward of an assessor in the Imperial Court at Wetzlar, 
where he learned his first lessons in law. A term at Gottingen 
introduced him to Spittler and Hugo, and at the age of twenty-one 
he began to teach at Marburg. In 1803 he published a treatise 
on the Roman Law of Possession, which won immediate success 
and which, revised at frequent intervals during the author's life 
and after his death, retains its place among the classics of legal 
literature. He now began to collect material for the work with 
which his name will ever be associated. While Eichhorn desired 
to find the roots of existing law in German history, Savigny 
determined to trace the influence of Roman law throughout the 
Middle Ages. In 1804 he started on a prolonged tour through the 
libraries of Western Europe. In 1808 he accepted a Professorship 
at Landshut, but two years later was summoned by Humboldt 

1 No adequate work on Savigny exists. The best studies are by 
Rudorff, 1S62 ; Landsberg (in Allg. Deutsche Biog.) ; Ennecerus, 1879. 
Ihering's striking appreciation is in his Gesammelte Aufsdtze, vol. ii., 1882. 
Foreign views are well represented by Mignet in Nouveaux 6loges historiques, 
1877, and J. E. G. de Montmorency in Great Jurists of the World, 1913. 



48 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, to teach Roman law at the newly founded University at Berlin. 
HI Savigny was a consummate lecturer, and his class-room was 
always crowded. ' His lectures,' wrote Bluntschli, 1 ' were of 
a wonderful clearness and certainty of expression, so beautifully 
arranged that he could print them without revision, and yet so 
free that they gave the impression of the freshest thought. His 
appearance at the desk had something stately and noble. The 
confidence of a man who was master of his material was enthroned 
on his open brow. The great, clear eye shone when he explained 
and analysed juristic conceptions.' ' Even to-day,' wrote Sybel 
in 1888, ' I hold Savigny for the most perfect academic teacher 
of the century.' 

Though sharing to the full the patriotic enthusiasm of the 
era of liberation, Savigny felt it his duty to oppose the demand 
for the codification of the law which grew out of the new con- 
sciousness of national unity. The plan, which was as old as 
Leibnitz, was put forward by several jurists, of whom by far the 
most important was Thibaut, the famous Heidelberg Professor. 2 
He had studied at Gottingen, and was well acquainted with the 
standpoint of the new historical school ; but he believed that a 
philosophical treatment of law was needed to achieve consistency 
and to remodel the products of the past in the light of the needs 
of the present. In his essay on the necessity of a code, ' written 
in fourteen days out of the warmth of my heart,' he raised the 
standard of legal reform. Germany had now rescued her honour 
and won the possibility of a happy future ; but there were still 
many obstacles to its realisation. The Fatherland remained a 
mosaic of little states. The existing law was a curious mixture. 
Roman law was foreign, and the fruit of a period of decline. 
The old German law-books, again, were full of anomalies. No 
human being could survey the whole of so vast and ill-arranged 
a territory. A simple code, constructed in a German spirit, 
would render it easy for judges and possible for ordinary citizens 
ro master the whole subject. The task should be carried out 
by the statesmen and scholars of Germany. Such a code would 
bind together the inhabitants of different states, even if they 
were condemned to remain politically separated. If it was 
contended that the traditional system was known and reverenced, 
the answer was that a code drawn up after emerging from the 
fires of the Napoleonic wars would be holy in the eyes of their 
children. 

1 Denkwiirdriges, i. 62-5, 1884. 

i Thibaut left a deep impression on his pupils. See Walter, Aus 
meinem Leben, 9i~4> T 865- 



J° 



EICHHORN AND SAVIGNY 49 

Thibaut's pamphlet, glowing with patriotic feeling, voicing CHAP, 
the new-born demand for a closer unity, and emphasising the m 
practical disadvantages of an antiquated system of law, created 
a profound impression ; but Savigny intervened with a reply so 
convincing that the project was abandoned for two generations. 
In the preface to the second edition of the ' Vocation of Our Time 
for Legislation,' he explains the genesis of the first. ' It appeared 
at a time which can never be forgotten by those who lived through 
it. For years the fetters which bound our country to the 
arbitrary rule of a foreigner had been drawn tighter and tighter, 
and it seemed that it must end in the annihilation of our nation- 
ality.' When the deliverance came, it was possible once more 
to discuss such matters of domestic interest. He begins by 
frankly admitting the reality of the demand for a code, both on 
practical and sentimental grounds. He recognised the feeling 
that Germany was called on to show herself not unworthy of the 
times, and admitted that certain changes must be made, as the 
French code had been eating into the German organism like 
a cancer. The popularity of codes dated from the eighteenth 
century. Men longed for a mechanically precise administration of 
justice, and for laws which, divested of all historic association, 
should be equally adapted to all nations and times. But now 
that the historical spirit had been awakened, there was no room 
for this shallow self-sufficiency. 

He then proceeded to explain his notion of the origin of 
positive law. ' For law, as for language, there is no moment 
of cessation. It is subject to the same movement and develop- 
ment as every other expression of the life of the people.' In 
its earliest shape it is simple. Later it enters on a double life, 
remaining, indeed, an expression of the community but becoming 
a science in the hands of the jurists. In by-laws and town laws 
we often find the survival of primitive practice. ' All law was 
originally formed by custom and popular feeling, next by juris- 
prudence — that is, by silently operating forces, not by the arbi- 
trary will of a lawgiver. ' He next turns to the practical difficulties 
of a code. Where were the materials ? And how was it possible 
to anticipate every case and to frame a decision before it occurred ? 
A body of precedents, often contradicting one another, would 
arise outside the acknowledged law. Roman law derived its 
greatness from its possession of leading principles. While the 
Roman State was alive and developing, no code was constructed 
or even proposed. The Codes were the products of decay and 
synchronise with its virtual disappearance. The Napoleonic 
Code was a thoroughly bad piece of work. Not every age had 



50 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, a vocation for law, any more than for art. There were no jurists 
III capable of making a great code. The task would be too great 
for a single brain, and the work of a Committee would lack unity. 
Existing law should be improved by legislation, while disputed 
points might be cleared up and old customs might be recorded. 
Finally a code, even if practicable, would do nothing but harm. 
It would destroy the study of the past, paralyse juristic thinking, 
and inspire no reverence. ' History is a noble instructress, and 
only through her can living contact with the primitive life of 
the people be maintained. The loss of this connection would 
rob the nation of the best part of its spiritual life. When the 
Jews were tired of waiting for the laws of God, they made a 
golden calf, and the genuine tables of the law were broken to 
pieces upon it.' 

Savigny's brilliant book was successful in its immediate 
purpose ; but it is a strange mixture of profound reasoning and of 
glaring fallacies. He gravely undervalued the merits of the 
philosophy of law, without which there could be no higher 
synthesis. Though he was right in saying that the time for 
codification had not come, he was wrong in declaring that it 
would never arrive. Historic law must be tested by and adapted 
to the rights of man. It is only a step from the ' Vocation ' to a 
championship of inveterate abuses and to the shelter of hoary 
usurpations behind the ark of legitimacy. Yet, despite his gro- 
tesque exaggeration of the evils of codes and of the difficulties 
in making them, he gave weighty expression to the historical 
... nature of law. He showed that law was, like language, an ex- 
pression of the life of the people, growing by natural process out 
of their needs. The jurists were no more the authors of law 
than the grammarians of language. They only developed what 
the folk-life created. Part of this product remained customary, 
while other portions were turned into ' laws.' The legend of the 
' wise lawgiver ' disappeared for ever. Savigny is above all the 
voice of the reaction against the eighteenth century. 

The controversy excited immense interest. In collaboration 
with Eichhorn he founded a ' Journal of Historical Jurisprudence ' 
to defend and illustrate his views. The opening article, which 
may be regarded as a popular summary of the ' Vocation,' dis- 
missed his opponents as the unhistorical school. Thibaut did not 
reply to the ' Vocation,' but he refused to accept the new label, 
suggesting as a fairer description of himself and his friends ' the 
historico-philosophical school.' When certain of Savigny's 
pupils spoke of him without the courtesy that their master had 
shown, he retaliated in a brilliant pamphlet, ' The So-called 



EICHHORN AND SAVIGNY 51 

Historical and Unhistorical School.' A good deal of the heat, CHAP, 
he declared, was due to the unfortunate choice of terms. He in no III 
way despised the historical study of law ; but he protested 
against the subjection of the present to the past. The controversy 
ended, so far as it concerned the two protagonists, with Savigny's 
explanation of his position in the preface to his ' System of 
Modern Roman Law.' He had used the title ' historical school ' 
because this department of legal study had been unduly neg- 
lected, and he had no wish to depreciate other methods. It was 
quite untrue that he desired to subject the present to the 
government of the past, or German to Roman law. He had 
merely insisted on the living connection with the past, and had 
declared that only by its study could the true nature of the present 
be grasped. No part of law was immutable. This explanation of 
his position, he believed, ought to end the struggle and lead to the 
disuse of party names. His wish was fulfilled in so far that the 
controversy entered on a new stage. Savigny's conception of 
law as an organic growth became the common possession of men 
of all schools, while the philosophic approach was brilliantly 
vindicated by Ihering. 

J In addition to being the principal champion of the genetic 
treatment of law, Savigny was the author of one of the most 
valuable investigations ever made into its history. The ' History 
of Roman Law in the Middle Ages ' began to appear in 1815. 
The book falls into two periods, the first comprising the six 
centuries before Irnerius, in which the survival of Roman law 
can be proved in great detail, the second containing the four 
succeeding centuries, when it became the object of systematic 
study. The first two volumes form the backbone of the work. 
Their theme is the survival of Roman law after the fall of the 
Empire, despite the convulsions of the barbarian invasions. 
It was his object to trace survival in every part of what had once 
been the Empire. This could only be accomplished by an inquiry 
into the fortunes of the peoples to whom it had been a living 
reality. If they had been annihilated, their law could not have 
survived. If they had lost personal freedom or the public life 
of the time had wholly ceased, Roman law could hardly have 
continued. ' For law is a piece of public life, bound to all its 
parts in many ways, and must die if the life disappears.' More- 
over the application of the old law could have been scarcely 
possible in the German states of the Empire without Roman 
judges and courts. 

He traces the survival of Roman law in the institutions of the 
towns, the local customs, canon law and academic study, and 

e 2 



52 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, concludes that what had been regarded as a renaissance in the 
III twelfth century was merely an increase of interest. He begins 
by sketching the legal institutions of the Empire in Italy and 
the provinces, passing to those of the Germanic peoples and 
finally to the countries conquered by the Teutons. In the 
greater part of the Frankish monarchy and in Lombardy the 
Roman Rectores gave place to German courts with civil and 
military authority. Did the destruction go deeper and affect 
the municipalities ? The common opinion that in Italy they 
were destroyed he believed to be wrong. The Germans, he 
declared, never attempted to root out or even to Germanise the 
Romans. Indeed the position of the latter was freer and happier 
than in the days of Imperial decay. Their property as a rule was 
secure, and their vitality is proved by the survival of so much of 
the language. Moreover the constitution of the town could be 
easily amalgamated with German practice. A further reason 
for the survival of the Roman constitution of the towns was that 
the Germans cared little for town life. Passing to the evidence 
for the continuity of legal instruction he declares that though 
there were no special schools, teaching was given as a part of 
Roman literature in many grammar schools. Roman law 
continued to exist and to expand through the medium of written 
sources and by the practice of the courts. Of these the first was 
far the most important, and Savigny attempted to collect the 
traces, whether verbal reproductions or obvious derivations. 
Among these sources are the law-books compiled for the Romans 
in several states, those of the Germans containing scraps of 
Roman law, charters, contracts, wills and commentaries. Many 
scholars had seen that Roman law was in operation throughout 
the Middle Ages ; but this was of little value unless it was known 
which parts were used and what degree of favour each of them 
enjoyed. The second volume marshals the evidence for survival 
among the Burgundians, the Visigoths, the Franks, the Ostro- 
goths, the Lombards, the Anglo-Saxons, in Byzantine Italy and 
in the writings of the Church. He often spoke of himself as 
a pioneer ; and his main contention is universally accepted. 
It was an immense achievement to prove the continuity of Roman 
law during the dark centuries between the fall of the Western 
Empire and the rise of the Bologna jurists. It was not surprising 
that, having convinced himself of the central fact, he should at 
times admit evidence that fails to satisfy a more exacting age. 
His most serious error was to assert the continuance of the Roman 
town constitution in Lombardy, a mistake corrected by Leo and 
banished for ever by the masterly researches of Karl Hegel. 



s) 



EICHHORN AND SAVIGNY 53 

^The second part of the work deals with the fortunes of Roman CHAP, 
law from the twelfth century to the Renaissance. The main HI 
feature of this period was the systematic study of texts, and its 
history is therefore to be found in the lives of the jurists. After 
an analysis of the sources he discusses the conditions of the 
revival of jurisprudence. The Lombard towns were rich and 
populous, and their commercial life raised many problems for 
which the Teutonic laws were wholly unsuitable. They were 
therefore driven to the study of Roman law. The great chapter 
on the Universities, above all that of Bologna, was a contribution 
to the history of mediaeval learning of the highest value. The 
last three volumes contain notices of the life and writings of the 
glossators. The historian fully realised that they could be nothing 
more than a work of reference ; but he maintained that it was 
necessary for some one to undertake a complete survey. Through- 
out the book the beneficent influence of Roman law and its 
contribution to the education of the world is asserted with un- 
wavering conviction. Savigny's later life was mainly devoted to 
a detailed investigation of the Roman elements in current German 
law and to the discharge of administrative duties under the 
Prussian government. Dying in 1861, at the patriarchal age 
of eighty-two, he had lived long enough to witness the application 
of historical methods to every branch of law and to be hailed 
throughout Europe as the greatest jurist of the century. 



CHAPTER IV 

JACOB GRIMM 

In the same wonderful decade which witnessed the earliest works 
of Niebuhr, Bockh, Savigny and Eichhorn, Jacob Grimm founded 
the science of Teutonic origins. 1 Bodmer had published part of 
the Nibelungen, and some of the minor poets interested them- 
selves in the Minnesinger ; but the study of antiquities was 
thoroughly uncongenial to the Aufkldrung. A new epoch opened 
with Herder, who paved the way for the historical study of 
literature by his conception of Nature-poetry, of the folk-soul, 
and of language as a treasure-house to which the centuries brought 
their contributions. He loved the childhood and youth of 
literature, the world of Homer, the Eddas and the Volkslieder. 
' I do not believe/ he wrote in 1793, ' that the Germans have 
less feeling than other nations for the merits of their ancestors. 
I think I see a time coming when we shall return more seriously 
to their achievements and learn to value our old gold.' Herder's 
interest came to be shared by a growing number of his country- 
men as the romantic movement increased in volume. Johannes 
Muller described the Nibelungen as the German Homer, Burger 
attempted to reproduce early models in his ballads, and Musaus 
utilised the sagas for his Tales. Tieck's emotional personality 
found nurture in the songs and romances of the Middle Ages. 
August Schlegel's lectures in Berlin declared war on the canons of 
the Aufkldrung, and Von der Hagen was encouraged by them to 
publish old German poetry. Fouque began a series of mediseval 
romances. Arnim and Brentano published their great collection 
of folk-songs known as the Wunderhorn, which brought back the 
Middle Ages in a flood and inspired a generation of German 
lyrists. The romanticists rendered a priceless service to historical 
studies. They enriched the imagination by their presentation 

1 The history of the science is best studied in Raumer's Geschichte 
d. Germanischen Philologie, 1870, and Paul's Grundriss d. Germanischen 
Philologie, vol. L, 1891. 



JACOB GRIMM 55 

of the many-coloured life of other ages and countries. They CHAP, 
doubled the intellectual capital and widened the horizon of their IV 
time. But they were artists, poets, dreamers, not scholars, 
philologists, historians. It was the glory of Jacob Grimm l that 
growing up in their circle he added to their best characteristics 
the critical scholarship and synthetic power which they lacked. 
Born in Hesse in 1785, Grimm entered Marburg and, in 
obedience to the wish of his father, enrolled himself as a student 
of law. His intellectual interests were awakened by Savigny, 
who became his hero and model. ' What can I say of his lectures,' 
he wrote half a century later in his Autobiography, ' except 
that they exercised a decisive influence on my whole life ? ' 
It was to him that he dedicated the ' Grammatik,' declaring that 
his heart had longed to do public homage when he was able to 
offer something worthy of his old master. It was in his library 
that he made acquaintance with early German literature, and 
it was from him that he learned the historic piety which stamps 
the life work of both teacher and pupil. If this friendship was 
the first important event in his life, the second was the appearance 
of Tieck's edition of the Minnelieder. Through Savigny he 
made the acquaintance of Arnim and Brentano, and the W under- 
horn was enriched from his stores. A fresh, almost uncultivated 
field, declared Grimm long afterwards, was before us. Goethe 
and Schiller had cared little for the Middle Ages. Bodmer had 
put the key in the lock, and the Romantics had turned it. When 
in 1805 Savigny took him to Paris to aid him in collecting material 
for the history of Roman Law, he undertook researches on his 
own account. ' I have been thinking,' Wilhelm had written to 
his brother, ' that you might look for old German poems among 
the manuscripts. Perhaps you might find something unknown 
and important.' Soon after his return, he determined on a 
collection of German sagas and fairy-tales. He quickly dis- 
covered that many were international, and was forced to survey 
all Teutonic and Romance literatures, glancing also at those of 
the Slavonic world and the East. He drank deeply at the springs 
of Creuzer and Gorres, and studied comparative grammar and 
early law. In these first few years of his intellectual awakening 
he mapped out the vast territories to the cultivation of which 
he was to devote his long and strenuous life. 

1 Scherer's Jacob Grimm, 2nd ed., 1885, is one of the best of German 
monographs. There is also much of value relating to the brothers in 
Scherer's Kleine Schriften, 1893. Weinhold's Rede auf Grimm, 1863, is 
authoritative. Grimm's brief autobiography is printed in his Kleine 
Schriften, vol. i., 1864. His correspondence fills many volumes. 



56 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. Beginning with reviews and essays the brothers rapidly 

1 ^ arrested the attention of scholars ; and the ' Mahrchen,' 1 the first 
volume of which was published in 1812, made the name of Grimm 
a household word throughout Germany. The brothers accom- 
plished for the fairy-tale what Arnim and Brentano had done 
for the Volkslied. Herder had remarked that a collection of 
children's stories would be a Christmas present for the young 
people of the future. His forecast was fulfilled ; but the main 
object of the work was to reveal the national wealth. The 
brothers strongly disapproved of the liberties which Arnim and 
Brentano took with their precious material. ' They care nothing 
for a close, historical investigation/ wrote Jacob to Wilhelm 
in 1809 ; ' they are not content to leave the old as it is, but insist 
on transporting it to our own time, to which it does not belong.' 
With their childlike natures and delight in folk-poetry the 
Grimms were ideal interpreters of the fairy-tale to the modern 
world. More than any other part of the romantic output the 
' Mahrchen ' became part of the life of the German nation. The 
collection of German sagas which followed was less successful. 
Most were already in print, though a few were added from oral 
tradition. A strange mixture of Christian and heathen elements, 
of magic and history, they were of the utmost value as a revelation 
of the popular mind. Grimm declared that the earliest history 
of every people was the Folk-Saga, which was always epic. 
He agreed with Arnim 's dictum that epics composed themselves, 
and with the paradox of Novalis that there was more truth in the 
tales of the poets than in the chronicles. The Romanticists 
grasped the cardinal truth that the historian had to reconstruct 
the life and achievements of the peoples. History had neglected 
sagas and ballads because they contained no ' facts.' These 
views were powerfully expressed in the essay, ' Thoughts on 
Myth, Epic and History ' ; but Grimm's teaching was not without 
grave flaws. He attributed to the sagas more historical sub- 
stance than they possessed. In his devotion to folk poetry he 
was unjust to other and later types. The conscious is reckoned 
inferior to the unconscious, individual work to the spontaneous 
creations of the community. He loved to regard mediaeval 
literature, like mediaeval cathedrals, as the anonymous expression 
of the soul of a people. 

The repetition and development of the romanticist views of 
early literature led to a sharp criticism by August Schlegel, 
who ridiculed the contention that epics and folk-songs write 

1 See H. Grimm's article, Die Briider Grimm u. die Mahrchen, in his 
Beitrdge z. deutschen Culturgeschichte, 1897. 



JACOB GRIMM 57 

themselves. 1 That we do not know the author is no proof that CHAP, 
they grew alone. The saga and the heroic lay were the common IV 
property, not the common product of their age. ' When we see 
a lofty tower rising above the habitations of men, we know that 
many hands brought stones for its construction ; but the stones 
are not the tower. That is the work of the architect.' Without 
nature there is no life ; but without art there is no form. All 
poetry is the combination of nature and art. Schlegel laughed 
at their reverence for the unimportant, their enthusiasm for 
old wives' fables and nursery rhymes. In the latter criticism 
there lurks something of the arrogance of the Aufkldmng ; but 
the essay as a whole came like a keen, cool breeze. The indict- 
ment extended to Grimm's etymology. The study of old 
German literature, he declared, could only succeed if based on 
exact grammatical knowledge. Grimm felt the justice of the 
criticism and began to turn to grammatical studies. Rask, whose 
Icelandic grammar he had praised on its appearance in 1811, 
had said that philology should not so much decree how words 
should be formed as describe how they had been formed and 
altered. This principle found a ready response in Grimm, who 
entertained the same reverence for language as for folk-poetry. 
The grammarian must be the student, not the teacher of 
language. Writing in the noonday of the Aufklarung, Adelung 
despised dialects, and constrained the language with bit and 
bridle. Others urged the expulsion of certain words and the 
alteration of many more. The attack on ancient forms was as 
repugnant to Grimm as an outrage on morals. The production 
of a bald uniformity was like the method of the Terrorists in the 
French Revolution ; and the fabrication of new words was a 
sin. It was the wrinkles and. warts that gave the incom- 
municable stamp of home, as on a familiar face. In 
place of learned pedantry and levelling reform he offered 
historical grammar, which taught respect for every living 
element. 

The laws of language had been outlined by Wilhelm Humboldt 
in 1812 in his masterly essay on the Basques. He urged the 
combination of the study of language and history, and the 
investigation of the characteristics of nations as the necessary 
accompaniment of grammar. The structure of language was 
organic ; but its formation was disturbed by borrowings and 
imperfect assimilations. Thus every language consisted of organic 
parts and inorganic accretions. These ideas were adopted by 
Grimm in his German Grammar, the first volume of which 
1 Schlegel's Werke, xii. 3S3-426. 



58 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

appeared in 1819. The purpose of the book was to reveal the 
operation of law in language as in history ; and the key could only 
be recovered by careful comparison of all Teutonic languages and 
dialects. His chief thesis was that all the families of German 
speech were closely related and that the present forms were 
unintelligible without a reference to the oldest. He made full 
use of the work of his predecessors, above all of Hickes and Rask, 
and, in another field, of Bopp ; but he introduced the compara- 
tive method into Teutonic philology. In the purely German 
territory he had to lay the foundations himself ; and an archi- 
tectural whole appeared where there had been nothing but 
isolated details. The book gave far more than its title suggested, 
for it was in truth a history of the Teutonic languages. Grimm's 
masterpiece formed one of the instruments by which historical 
science has ever since made its advance. The most competent 
of judges, Benecke, declared that he did not know whether most 
to admire the author's insight or knowledge. His old critic, 
Schlegel, hastened to express his congratulations. Following 
his guide the reader rejoices in the ever-increasing light, till 
an ordered world meets his gaze. 

The work was out of print in a year, and in 1820 its author 
began to rewrite it. He made new and important discoveries as 
he worked, and the printed sheets were revised by Lachmann. 
The arrangement of material was improved, and the second 
edition was in many respects a new work. The most important 
addition was the statement of ' Grimm's Law,' or the explanation 
of the change of letters. There were laws of sound. No words 
could be traced to a common origin unless the differences in their 
sounds could be explained by a law of variation. In this way 
the relations of peoples could be recovered, and some knowledge 
of the early life of humanity be obtained. Three further volumes of 
the ' Grammatik ' were published, the latest attacking the problem 
of syntax. When the publisher inquired whether Grimm pre- 
ferred to complete or to revise his work, he chose the latter. 
Though incomplete, it is beyond comparison the most important 
work ever devoted to German philology. No one had ever 
penetrated so deep into the innermost recesses of language and 
seized its intimate relation to life. In becoming a philologist 
Grimm did not cease to be a poet. His creative insight is con- 
tinually flashing light on dark places. Adelung had asked what 
sense there could be in giving a sex to lifeless things and abstract 
conceptions. Grimm answers by trying to retrace the paths 
along which primitive fancy moved. In its early forms language 
is concrete and pictorial; in its later, abstract and intellectual. 



JACOB GRIMM 59 

This view of the transition from the sensible to the rational was CHAP, 
a weighty contribution to the history of mankind. IV 

Between the first two and the last two volumes of the ' Gram- 
matik ' Grimm published his marvellous work on Legal Antiquities, 
a picture of early German life from a particular angle. 1 The 
differences he had shown to exist between the early and later 
stages of literature and language existed equally in the realm 
of law and religion. He had warmly adopted Savigny's view 
of the nature of law and had hailed the ' Vocation ' with delight. 
He was especially interested in symbolic actions, the forms in 
which conceptions expressed themselves. In an early essay on 
Poetry in Law, he had declared that they had grown in one 
bed. The poet and the judge alike uttered the common thoughts. 
He was unjustly accused of failing to treat the subject historically 
or to trace the gradual transformation of institutions. But his 
task was wholly different from that of Eichhorn. He confined 
himself to the sensible, the visible, the pictorial element, the 
customs and uses, the actions and forms which an unlettered age 
demanded. His chief authorities were the so-called Weistumer, 
or dooms, and early literature and legend. No jurist could have 
written the book, for no jurist possessed the requisite knowledge 
of the languages and literatures of the mediaeval Teutonic world. 
While Eichhorn desired to discuss the foundations of modern 
law and practice, Grimm never troubled himself about later 
developments. Every usage possessed its importance as an 
expression of the folk-spirit. 

The book was hailed with delight by the jurists of Germany. 
Savigny rejoiced in the brilliant development given to his own 
teaching. Eichhorn was warm in his praise, without realising 
to the full extent its creative character. Michelet gave intense 
satisfaction to the modest author by building his own ' Symbolic 
Origins of French Law ' on its foundations. Grimm truly 
declared that his book was a work of suggestion. Its suggestive- 
ness is still unexhausted nearly a century after its appearance, 
and its influence may be traced in every subsequent writer on 
early Teutonic law. Closely allied to the Legal Antiquities was 
the edition of Weistumer, or dooms, of which four volumes 
appeared during his life and three others after his death. ' Unless 
I am blinded by enthusiasm,' he wrote, ' this collection will 
enormously enrich and almost revolutionise our legal antiquities, 
make important contributions to a knowledge of law, mythology 
and customs, and give warmth and colour to our early history.' 

1 On Grimm as a jurist we possess Hiibner's admirable monograph, 
Jacob Grimm u. das deutsche Recht, 1895. 



60 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. They played the same part in law as folk-songs and fairy-tales 

IV in mythology and poetry. In both cases he used popular 

tradition to illustrate and explain written memorials. But the 

earliest date from the thirteenth century ; and he was at fault 

in employing them as illustrations of far earlier times. 

A further aspect of early Teutonic life was explored in the 
' German Mythology.' Gorres and Mone had studied the sur- 
vival of heathen practice and belief without employing critical 
methods. ' In my books/ declared Grimm in the preface, ' I 
have tried to show that the language of our ancestors was not 
rough and wild but fine and harmonious ; that they did not live 
in hordes but were free, moral and observant of law. I now 
desire to exhibit their hearts full of belief, to recall their mag- 
nificent if imperfect conceptions of higher beings.' Literature, 
sagas, fairy-tales, customs, language were made to yield their 
contribution, and a mass of oral matter was collected. The old 
world revived with its brilliant colouring and fantastic shapes. 
The stage was crowded with gods, swan-maidens, nixies, cobolds, 
elfs, dwarfs and giants. Mythology being a creation of the 
poetical spirit, the talent of Grimm was peculiarly fitted to deal 
with it. The introduction unfolds a great picture of Christianity 
spreading over Europe, while heathenism retreats step by step. 
Beginning with the gods, we pass to the lesser mythological 
beings, to the elements and the seasons in relation to human life, 
to the personality of animals and plants. The world of light is 
paralleled by the world of darkness, by demons, witches and 
magicians. The ' German Mythology ' took its place among the 
classics of European scholarship. But though it is often 
regarded as his most perfect work, and though its vitality and in- 
sight are marvellous, it is not without serious faults. The picture 
of Teutonic civilisation is too rosy, and he credits early times with 
many customs and beliefs of subsequent growth. A few years later 
considerable portions were rendered antiquated by Adalbert 
Kuhn's researches in Indo-Germanic mythology and by Mann- 
hardt's investigations into popular cults. Yet it was none the 
less the foundation on which the science of Teutonic heathenism 
has been reared, and holds an honoured place beside the Grammar 
and the Legal Antiquities among the works which recreated 
ancient Germany. 

Grimm's later life was chiefly occupied by linguistic studies. 
His ' History of the German Language,' published in 1848, was 
rather a series of dissertations than a connected narrative, and 
may almost be described as an appendix to the Grammar. 
A good many of the results of the earlier work were modified 



JACOB GRIMM 61 

in consequence of the works of Bopp and Pott. The researches CHAP, 
of Zeuss had interested him in ethnography ; and though parts of IV 
the work are fantastic and some of its identifications of early 
tribes incorrect, the attempt to throw the light of philology on 
ethnology and culture was not without importance. The 
German Dictionary, the last great task of his life, was suggested 
to the brothers by a publisher, and accepted by them in return 
for a living wage. It was to include all words from the age of 
Luther to the age of Goethe. The first part appeared in 1852, 
and the letter ' F ' had been almost completed when Jacob Grimm 
died in 1863, full of years and honours. ' All my works/ he wrote 
in one of his last essays, ' relate to the Fatherland, from whose 
soil they derive their strength.' These simple words may serve 
as an epitaph for one who was at once a great patriot and a great 
scholar, and who carried through life the heart of a little child. 

Jacob's earliest and most effective helper was his brother 
Wilhelm. 1 Their studies began together at Marburg, and their 
publications were joint till the elder brother turned his attention 
seriously to grammar. During the middle decades of their lives 
their paths led in different directions ; but their closing years 
witnessed a renewal of co-operation. The Dictionary is no less a 
memorial to their joint labours than the ' Mahrchen.' In addition 
to the works in which he assisted his greater brother, Wilhelm 's 
independent production was of the highest value. His greatest 
achievement was his study of the German heroic saga. His 
scope was far narrower than that of his brother. It was his 
instinct rather to select a limited territory and to examine every 
corner of it with loving care than to roam over immense tracts 
of country. He lacked the creative genius of Jacob ; but he was 
the more exact and careful worker. The relations of the brothers 
form one of the idylls in the history of scholarship, and they 
remain associated in the memory as they appear in the frontis- 
piece of the Dictionary. They loved the German people, and 
their love has been richly repaid. They rank immediately after 
Goethe and Schiller among the spiritual influences which have 
made Germans all over the world conscious of their unity. 

The Grimms grew out of the romantic circle ; but they 
owed less to any of its members than to Benecke, 3 librarian and 

1 Jacob's address on his brother is in his Kleine Schriften, vol. i. Their 
Briefwechsel aus der Jugendzeit was published in 1881. Tonnelat, Les 
Freres Grimm, 1912, gives a good account of their early fellow-work. 
Cp Scherer's article in Allg. Deutsche Biog. 

- Their correspondence with Benecke, published in 1889, reveals a 
charming intimacy. Cp. Scherer's article in A llg. Deutsche Biog. 



62 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. Professor at Gottingen, who was the first to make lectures on early 
IV German literature and language part of the ordinary curriculum. 
He assisted the brothers in their early researches, lending them 
books from the library, and encouraging them by favourable 
reviews. His first important publication was an edition of the 
fables of Bonerius, which marks the beginning of scientific 
lexicography. His talent was philological rather than literary ; 
but in this sphere his achievement was unrivalled. Each word 
was examined in its historical development, and the finest 
shades of meaning extracted. Each monument of early poetry 
was studied in the light of its time and place. Benecke was not 
only, in the words of Jacob Grimm, the inaugurator of grammatical 
knowledge of early German literature at the Universities, but 
also the founder of the strictly historical method of studying this 
branch of literature, which had hitherto been judged by aesthetic 
standards. 

While many philologists rendered valuable assistance, 
Lachmann l shares with Jacob Grimm the honour of ranking 
as the joint founder of the scientific study of early German 
literature and language. Born eight years after Grimm, he 
learned exact philology under Hermann at Leipzig, and owed 
his initiation into Teutonic studies to Benecke. ' As Benecke 
lectured year in, year out, on the poetry of the thirteenth century,' 
he said later, ' I felt stimulated to learn old German.' At the 
same time he continued his classical studies, and the aged Heyne 
foresaw his pupil's greatness. His edition of Propertius con- 
tained the germ of all his future achievements in different depart- 
ments of philology. His aim was the reconstruction of the 
text as the author wrote it, on the authority of the best manu- 
scripts. The emendations in which philologists rejoiced were 
not to be thought of till the manuscripts had been examined. 
In 1816 he turned to the Nibelungen, the present form of which 
he attributed to the thirteenth century. He gradually obtained 
an unequalled insight into the metric and philological character- 
istics of mediaeval poetry, reconstructing texts from an exhaustive 
study of all available manuscripts. The ' Grammatik ' was warmly 
welcomed, Lachmann declaring that it put them all to shame 
for their ignorance. The two men now entered into close relations, 
and in his preface to the second edition Grimm declared that it 
was impossible to describe the help of Benecke and Lachmann. 
' Such full and open communications as Lachmann has vouchsafed 
me must have been experienced for their value to be understood.' 

1 See Hertz, Lachmann, 1851 ; Jacob Grimm's Kleine Scriften, vol. i., 
and Leo's Rede zur Sdcularfeier Lachmanns, 1893. 



JACOB GRIMM 63 

When Lachmann was appointed to a Chair in Berlin in 1824, CHAP, 
he had acquired an incomparable knowledge of the printed IV 
and manuscript sources of early German literature, which 
enabled him to pour forth critical masterpieces in rapid succession. 
His first work was Hartmann's ' Iwein,' for which Benecke gave 
him his collections, and which he boldly declared to be the 
first critical edition of an old German poem. The ' Iwein ' was 
fpUowed by an edition of Walther von der Vogelweide, which 
first made the poet inteUigible, and by the works of Wolfram. 
' My aim,' he declared, ' was to make visible one of the greatest 
poets in his full splendour.' Returning to the Nibelungen he 
published the text in 1826 and his critical investigations ten years 
later. It was possible, he contended, to trace twenty separate 
songs ; but his reconstruction of the poem was widely attacked. 
Into the field of German literature, as into Homeric studies and 
New Testament criticism, Lachmann brought fruitful ideas 
which, even when not accepted in their entirety, opened up new 
horizons and worked like a leaven long after his premature death. 
In his obituary notice Grimm declared that philologists were of 
two classes — those who studied words for the sake of things and 
those who studied things for the sake of words. He himself 
belonged to the former, Lachmann to the latter. ' Born to be an 
editor,' he added, ' Germany has never seen his equal.' He 
made a history of mediaeval German literature possible. His 
true master was Bentley, whom he pronounced ' the greatest 
critic of modern times.' But while Bentley sometimes reached 
his most brilliant results by a flash of genius, Lachmann won his 
triumphs by incredible industry and insight into the variations 
of language and metre. While Grimm failed as a Professor and 
founded no school, Lachmann's lectures were the starting-point 
of many a career. Otto Jahn dedicated his first important work 
to his ' incomparable teacher.' Simrock's versions of the 
mediaeval classics were built on his foundations. Moritz Haupt, 
his successor and literary executor, worshipped him as the 
supreme master. Though he was in no sense an historian, he 
supplied historians with a key to large tracts of the life and 
thought of mediaeval Germany. 



CHAPTER V 

THE MONUMENTA 

CHAP. While the romantic movement aroused interest in early German 
literature and legend, the systematic study of German history 
was the result of the fiery ordeal of the Napoleonic wars. The 
religious and political disunion of Germany rendered it difficult 
for her inhabitants to realise their unity. Lessing and Herder, 
Klopstock and Wieland, Goethe and Schiller felt themselves 
citizens of the world. It required the overwhelming disaster 
of Jena, the execution of Palm and the humiliations of the French 
occupation to teach the sacredness of the Fatherland. ' Shake 
your chains as you will,' said Goethe, ' he is too strong for you ; 
you will never break them.' ' Prussia is done for,' declared 
Napoleon ; ' she has disappeared from the map of Europe.' 
The two greatest minds of the age were equally blind. The 
regeneration of Prussia was a national achievement. Stein 
came from Nassau, Hardenberg and Scharnhorst from Hanover, 
Gneisenau and Fichte from Saxony, Niebuhr from Schleswig- 
Holstein. The political independence and the spiritual unity 
of the country were won by the same terrible struggle. Though 
Germany had to wait for half a century for unification the 
flame of patriotism continued to glow ; and the chief architect 
of liberation turned to a new task of national service. 



I 

The need of a collection of the sources of mediaeval history 
had been keenly felt during the eighteenth century ; but all 
plans were wrecked on the impossibility of securing the co-opera- 
tion of scholars and on the lack of financial support. Historio- 
graphy was particularist or cosmopolitan, not yet national. On 
the downfall of Napoleon, Germans began to realise more fully 
the value of their possessions. In 1814 Savign}/ informed Grimm 



THE MONUMENTA 65 

of the plan of a society for the study of German history and an CHAP, 
edition of its sources. 1 ' You and your brother,' he added, v 
' would make ideal secretaries ; think about it and win others 
for the project.' The scheme, for which he hoped to receive 
Government assistance, included the foundation of historical 
societies in each State, co-operating in common tasks. The 
plan embraced Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands, and 
included not only the sources of history but of literature, lan- 
guage and art before the Reformation. The magnificent ideal was 
far too ambitious and quickly broke down by its own weight. 
Its successor was to be more modest and more successful. 

When the war was over, Stein withdrew almost completely 
from public life. 2 He had always been interested in history, 
and he now employed his leisure in its systematic study. He 
quickly realised the need of a critical edition of the sources ; 
and he felt that such a work would serve the purpose of patriotism 
no less than of scholarship. ' Since my retirement,' he wrote 
in 1816, ' I have wished to quicken the taste for German history 
and facilitate its study, and thereby to contribute to the preserva- 
tion of the love of the common fatherland and of our great 
ancestors.' Eichhorn, whom he asked to interest the scholars 
of Berlin, entered warmly into the scheme, and a plan was drawn 
up and forwarded to Hardenberg ; but neither the King nor the 
minister gave the project any encouragement. In 1818 Stein 
brought his project before the representatives of the Confedera- 
tion at Frankfurt ; but here again he met with disappointment. 
There was still but little interest in German history, while 
Metternich and his disciples suspected liberalism and revolution 
to be lurking behind any undertaking of a ' national ' character. 
Determined to wait no longer, he provided a large sum of 
money and persuaded several of his Westphalian friends to do the 
same. Early in 1819 the Society for the Study of Early German 
History was founded at Frankfurt, and a journal began to appear, 
containing preliminary discussions and communications. One 
scheme after another was put forward, and the vast extent of the 
undertaking and the necessity of consulting the archives of many 
countries became ever more apparent. The title, Monumenta 
Germanice Historica, was selected by Stein ; and the famous 

1 See Steig, Goethe u. die Bruder Grimm, chap. 10, 1892. 

- The story of Stein's relations with the Monumenta must be read in 
Pertz's vast biography, vols. v. and vi. Neither Seeley nor Lehmann 
devotes much attention to it. The introduction to Wattenbach's Geschichts- 
quellen im Mittelalter and Diimmler's article, ' t)ber die Entstehung der 
Monumenta Germaniae,' Im Neuen Reich, 1876, are full of information. 

F 



66 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, motto, Sandus amor ftatrice dat animum, was adopted as 
V expiessing the spirit in which the work was conceived. 

The first volume of the ' Archiv ' contained a long list of volun- 
teers and patrons, including such eminent names as Eichhorn, 
Schlosser, Wilken, Dahlmann, Raumer, Heeren, Niebuhr, 
Humboldt, Jacob Grimm and Goethe. But the competent 
scholars to whom Stein could look for assistance were few. 
The romanticists had paid little attention to history, and of the 
historians in active service some declared they were too busy, 
while the assistance of others was not worth having. Stein gave 
attention to the minutest particulars both of the business and the 
literary sides of the enterprise ; but he was only an amateur, 
and the editor quickly revealed his entire incompetence. It 
was while Stein was almost overwhelmed with the difficulties 
of his gigantic enterprise that timely aid arrived. Pertz l at this 
time was archivist at Hanover. He had written a book on the 
Merovingian Mayors of the Palace, to which his old master 
Heeren had contributed a flattering preface. Stein was greatly 
impressed by it, and was delighted when he expressed* his 
willingness to edit the Carolingian sources. In 1820 he invited 
the young author to go to Vienna to search for manuscripts. 
Pertz accepted the commission with alacrity, and on his way 
he visited his patron at Nassau. The veteran statesman and the 
young scholar were strongly attracted to each other, and the 
partnership to which history owes such an incalculable debt 
was formed. When Diimge was induced to retire in 1822, 
Pertz was at once entrusted with the editorship. ' He is an 
excellent young man,' wrote Stein to Niebuhr. ' The whole 
work must be entrusted to his hands, and the selection of 
colleagues must be left to him.' 

Before the enterprise was out of danger many difficulties 
had still to be overcome. Dahlmann withdrew on account 
of the Carlsbad decrees, declaring that such a work could not be 
carried on in an atmosphere of suspicion and repression. Stein 
was greatly annoyed, and spoke bitterly of ' those irritable and 
unreasonable beings, the scholars.' His chief wrath, however, 
was reserved for the rulers who stubbornly refused their help. 
' Governments,' he wrote, ' send costly expeditions to Egypt and 
Brazil. The history of the Pharaohs, the life of gazelles and 
monkeys is studied, but nothing is done for the history of our 

1 See Pertz's Autobiography and Letters, 1895 ; Waitz's articles, ' Die 
Zukunft der Monumenta Germaniae,' Historische Zeitschrift, vol. xxx., and 
' Pertz u. die Monumenta Germaniae,' in Neues Archiv, vol. ii., and Arndt's 
article on Pertz, Im Neuen Reich, 1876. 



THE MONUMENTA 67 

people.' The Emperor, Gentz told Pertz, disapproved of all CHAP, 
societies, even historical societies, as he did not know to what V 
use German history might be put. These difficulties, however, 
were surmounted, and in 1824 * ne definitive plan of the work 
was published. It was to consist of five parts — Writers, Laws, 
Imperial Acts, Letters and Antiquities, of which only the first 
two were taken in hand. The work would properly have begun 
with the Goths, the Franks and the Lombards ; but for this period 
it was essential to consult manuscripts in many libraries. To 
wait till the earliest sources were ready for publication would be 
to defer the commencement of the undertaking for years. Pertz, 
therefore, determined to begin with the Carolingians. Stein had 
often told his friends that he would not live to see the appear- 
ance of any part of his great undertaking ; and when the editor 
was at last able to send him the first volume in 1826, his delight 
was unbounded. He who was usually so reserved in the 
expression of his feelings declared his ' unspeakable joy.' He 
chivalrously added, ' Yours is the greatest part of the merit ; 
my part was only to have helped.' 

Pertz brought to his task unquenchable enthusiasm, a wide know- 
ledge of the printed sources of mediaeval history, and a thorough 
competence in the handling of manuscripts. His colleague and 
successor Waitz declared that his transcripts and collations were 
among the best ever made, better than most who later set them- 
selves up as his censors. The volume marks an epoch in historical 
study. It was the first time that German texts had been edited 
on the same critical principles as the works of classical writers. 
Of course it was not perfect. Some manuscripts were credited 
with too much, others with too little authority. The criticism 
was rather textual than historical. But it was a not unworthy 
beginning of the greatest co-operative historical work of the 
century. The second volume appeared in 1829, and in 1835 
the first volume of the Laws was issued. When Pertz resigned 
the editorship after half a century, he could look round on twenty- 
five stately folios, containing the Scriptores from the Carolingians 
to the Interregnum and an almost complete collection of the 
Leges, in nearly every one of which was his own work. Only 
those who know the miserable condition in which the national 
annals then stood, imperfectly and incompletely printed in 
different books, can realise the immense advance made when all 
the sources were collected and critically arranged. Though his 
edition of the laws and capitularies was radically imperfect, his 
life-work rendered the critical study of mediaeval history possible. 
The greatest compliment ever paid to the Monumenla was when 



68 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. Ranke remarked, ' Without your great work I could never have 
V attracted a circle of young men to these studies.' 

The great statesman, to whose initiative the work was due 
and without whose energetic support it would never have been 
accomplished, passed away in 1831. He followed the revival of 
historical study with lively satisfaction, greeted Raumer's ' Hohen- 
staufen' and Stenzel's 'Franconian Emperors' as works of scho- 
larly patriotism, and foretold Ranke 's supremacy. Bohmer was 
not indulging in flattery when he declared that Stein knew history 
better than most of its professors. Many years later Pertz was 
to discharge his debt of gratitude to his beloved patron in the 
portentous biography which it is equally difficult to read and to 
neglect. After his death the whole burden rested on the shoulders 
of the editor. The progress of the work was only rendered 
possible by the generosity of Bohmer and other individuals. 
Some contributors worked badly, others failed to fulfil their 
promises. But Lappenberg was a tower of strength, while such 
brilliant recruits from Ranke 's Seminar as Waitz and Kopke 
lent their aid. As the years passed Pertz became increasingly 
dictatorial, and conflicts with his colleagues were not uncommon. 
One of the most brilliant of them, Jaffe, quarrelled violently with 
his chief. Stenzel found the rein too tight and withdrew his 
co-operation. But the fault was not wholly on one side. Waitz 
testified after his death that they had worked harmoniously, and 
in a memorial address Ranke declared that he had always 
refrained from joining in the general cry which forgot his virtues 
in his failings. 

The most helpful among Pertz's friends in the critical days 
was Bohmer, 1 who in his early life had drunk in the enchantments 
of Frankfurt. The instinctive love of his city and the traditions 
to which it bore witness was intensified by seeing the French 
invader in the streets. ' Old Frankfurt,' he wrote later, ' was 
my first love. In my school days I used to wander about and 
look at the ancient buildings. In Napoleon and his followers I 
saw incarnate devilry.' Studying jurisprudence at Gottingen 
he came to entertain a profound dislike for Roman Law, and 
maintained that the German people had been spoiled by the 
Roman jurists. His reverence for the Middle Ages was increased 
by the writings of Johannes Miiller, whom he described as the 

1 Janssen wrote his life and collected his correspondence in 1868. 
The biography fills the first volume. The work is indispensable for the 
history of Teutonic scholarship. Ranke's address is in his Abhandlungen 
u. Versuche, Neue Sammlung, 535-44, 1888, Dollinger's in Akademische 
?, vol. ii., 1889. 



THE MONUMENTA 69 

greatest German historian. Like Goethe he was among the CHAP, 
earliest admirers of the Boisseree collection. In 1818, at the age V 
of twenty-three, he set out for Italy, visiting Freiburg and Strass- 
burg on the way. ' No one,' he wrote, ■ will ever convince me 
that the Middle Ages, which created such works, were a time 
of barbarism.' In later life he used to say that none could 
realise how hard it had been to convince people of the beauty of 
early German architecture and painting. He became the friend 
of Grimm, Hagen, Uhland and other Germanists, and through 
Brentano entered the circle of Catholics who were working for the 
revival of religious life. Though nominally a Protestant, his 
historical and aesthetic sympathies were wholly Catholic. 

Bohmer declared that he was not driven to history by curiosity, 
ambition or dilettantism. ' It was love of the Fatherland, the 
conviction that the knowledge of the past could be instructive 
for the present, the hope that the true might lead to the good.' 
In his memorial address Dollinger pronounced him the purest 
patriot, the most German soul he ever knew. ' His whole being 
was in the thought of the German fatherland, in work for its 
honour and prosperity.' He had begun to study mediaeval 
sources when his course was determined by a meeting with 
Stein in 1823. ' To him it is wholly due that I have assisted 
patriotic studies.' He aided Pertz with his plans, became secretary 
and treasurer of the Society, and undertook numerous journeys 
in search of material. His ideal was Mabillon, a man equally 
learned and pious, the author not of pretentious narratives but 
of collections from which a true knowledge of the Middle Ages 
could be constructed. ' For people and fatherland,' he wrote in 
1829, ' that is the motto of my life.' In this spirit of national piety 
he undertook the Imperial Acts. ' Written by those who knew 
the truth, their credibility is scarcely ever in doubt.' They 
reflect every variety of political and legal relationship, and their 
rays illumine periods where the chronicle and even the legend 
fail. He determined not to wait till time and money could be 
found for the work on which he was engaged, and published the 
first volume of the ' Regesta ' in 1831. It was a keen regret that 
Stein, ' my fatherly friend, perhaps the last great German of the 
old time,' had not lived to see it. It received a warm welcome, 
Grimm hailing it as one of the most important works of German 
historical literature. The personalities of the Emperors became 
strangely real when their movements could be followed, and 
the documents issued from the Imperial Chancery could be 
studied in connection with the place and circumstances of their 
composition. 



70 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. Arnim had compared the early world to a city sunk below 

the waves, its foundations remaining, its old streets and squares 
still visible, from which many a valuable treasure could be rescued. 
Intent on salvage, Bohmer determined to produce cheap and 
handy collections of important, rare or new material, with a 
characterisation of each piece. A far more living picture, he 
declared, could be formed from these originals than from all 
modern works put together. The first volume of the ' Fontes 
Rerum Germ anicar urn,' appearing in 1843, was mainly devoted 
to Ludwig of Bavaria, the second to the thirteenth century, a 
third to the twelfth. They were sent forth in the hope that they 
might be used by teachers in schools and stimulate the historical 
consciousness of Germany. ' To know what has been and is no 
more, to see how much of what is rooted in the past still stands — 
that seems to me the beginning and condition of all higher 
culture. It is of special importance for a people which wants 
to raise itself, not by continuing the last few centuries of de- 
cadence, but by linking itself on to the earlier times of power and 
greatness.' He urged that each state and province should form 
an historical society, and was delighted when the Lower Rhine 
led the way. In 1844 he published the first volume of a revised 
edition of the ' Regesta,' which was in fact a new work. The docu- 
ments were far more numerous and the extracts much fuller, while 
short essays on each ruler were added. Giesebrecht declared 
that it was his eternal merit to have unlocked the inner heart 
of the Empire's history, and that his works were as epoch-making 
as the Monumenta itself. The value of his services was warmly 
recognised by such scholars as Lappenberg and Stalin in Germany, 
by Kopp and Chmel beyond its borders. Huillard-Breholles 
declared that his own vast work on Frederick II could not 
have been compiled had not Bohmer led the way. 

Though Bohmer never wrote narrative history, his views were 
in no way concealed. 1 He was equally convinced that lack of 
religion was the greatest evil of his time and that Protestantism 
was unable to reconstruct society on a Christian basis. He 
yearned for a reunited, visible Church. Brentano said of his 
friend, ' He is more Catholic than I.' The Reformation, he 
declared, was the greatest misfortune of the German nation, 
and he never forgave it for subjecting the Church to the State. 
The Church was the noblest and most magnificent product of 
history. In the conflict of Empire and Papacy he was on the 
side of the latter. ' I cannot bear the contemptuous judgments 
of venerable institutions, the belittling of the Church and its 
1 Cp. Freimund, Bohmer' s Geschichtliche Ansichten, 1845. 



THE MONUMENTA 71 

blessed activity.' He left money for historical work to be carried CHAP, 
on ' in a Roman Catholic sense.' In his last illness, he declared, v 
' I have always regarded the Church as the Mother to whom we 
owe the best that we possess. May it regain its lost power 
over men's minds.' Ranke criticised this ardent soul with his 
usual urbanity when he said that Bohmer's conviction of the 
greatness of the old hierarchy went beyond the demands of 
historical recognition. He was a child of the Middle Ages born out 
of due time, an orphan in a strange world. ' What an error,' de- 
clared Ranke, speaking both as a Christian and an historian, 'what 
an error to think that one period has been especially favoured 
by God.' Bohmer was one of the most original personalities 
among nineteenth century historians. His judgments of men 
and institutions were biassed, his technique was radically im- 
perfect, and the 'Regesta' have had to be edited afresh by Ficker 
and his pupils. But he ranks with Stein and Pertz among the 
heroes of the Monumenta. He was not exaggerating the signifi- 
cance of his work when he wrote, ' The furrows I have ploughed 
and the seed I have sown will not be blown away by the first 
wind.' 

II 

If the Monumenta was the chief product of the new spirit 
of nationalism, 1 its effect was also seen in the narratives of the 
centuries when the German Empire was the leading power in 
Europe. The most learned work of this class was Wilken's 
' History of the Crusades. ' A pupil of the elder Eichhorn, Wilken 2 
developed a keen appetite for Oriental history and literature, 
and became Professor at Heidelberg in 1805. A friend of 
Johannes Miiller, Arnim, Brentano and other members of the 
Romantic circle, he approached his subject with genuine sym- 
pathy. Though the first volume sometimes failed to distinguish 
saga from history and was superseded by Sybel, the later volumes 
were far more critical and retained their value for two generations. 
The work rested on a thorough knowledge of Oriental sources, and 
presented the first full and authoritative picture of an eventful 
chapter in European history. Warmly welcomed by his con- 
temporaries, it was praised by such competent judges of a later 
generation as Giesebrecht and Kugler. A still higher compliment 

1 The well-known Heeren and Ukert series of histories was undertaken 
by Perthes, the publisher, in a similar spirit. Perthes' Leben, vol. iii., 

25-4 1 - 

2 See Stoll, Friedrich Wilken, 1896. 



72 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

was paid it in 1880 when Rohricht declared that there was only 
one opinion of the work in the learned world and that one-third 
of the book was still unsurpassed. 

No writer took a more active part in fostering the new-born 
interest in national history than Luden, 1 whom Johannes Miiller 
called his adoptive son. In 1808, a year after Fichte had delivered 
his Addresses to the German Nation, he lectured at Jena on the 
study of German history. ' Not only was the auditorium filled/ 
he declared, ' but the anteroom, the staircase and the court. I 
wish that we Germans would study like children the life of our 
beloved parents, dominated by the holy thought of the Father- 
land. In these days what could quicken and comfort us more 
than the return to the happier times of old, when the tree that 
is now broken stood proudly erect ? What could strengthen us to 
virtue and action more than the example of our fathers ? ' 
The very spirit of nascent German nationalism breathes in these 
glowing words. If the present was dark, the past shone with a 
steady radiance. ' It is the happiness of German history that 
the Germans never sank to the level which is the shame of other 
peoples, but always strove with powerful determination for what 
they held to be the true worth of mankind. Their character has 
never changed.' 

Luden's chief work was his ' History of the German People,' 
published in twelve volumes between 1825 an d ^37- ' The 
time of indifference to German history,' declares the preface, 
' is past. A generation ago the Middle Ages seemed to be a 
starless night, faintly lit by a pale northern light. The few 
who dared to enter this gloomy world and tell others what they 
saw got thanks only from a few friends. Their books were often 
named but seldom read. But then the awful time of misfortune 
broke the bonds of indifference and prejudice. The need of self- 
respect sent us back to our fathers. We learned hope from our 
own earlier triumphs. Now the first enthusiasm is gone, the 
magic is past, the first need is satisfied. But the delight in what 
we found has strengthened the desire for further search. Anyone 
who feels a taste for history should study above all the history 
of his fatherland. It is not a duty but an instinct of the human 
heart.' His admiration for German character is as ardent as 
ever. A history of the Middle Ages should start from the 
Germans and return to them. ' Of the new peoples they stood 
highest both in power and in culture.' The main purpose of the 
book was political and ethical. ' I hope my book will strengthen 

1 See his Ruckblicke in mein Leben, 1847, and Herrmann, Die 
Geschichtsauffassung Ludens, 1904. 



THE MONUMENT A 73 

the patriotic sense.' His ambition was realised ; but no works CHAP, 
are so quickly superseded as patriotic histories. After visiting V 
him Dahlmann wrote to a friend, ' He will never go any further.' 
He was right. Luden remained throughout life the ardent 
patriot, the didactic Professor of the era of Liberation. 

Among Luden's pupils was Voigt, 1 who declared that his 
admiration for the Middle Ages was aroused by the Jena Pro- 
fessor. His work on Hildebrand was suggested by Luden, ' to 
whom I owe everything that I am.' The Pope was portrayed as 
a great reformer, worthy of the reverence of all good men. The 
book, which was bitterly attacked in certain Protestant circles, 
contributed to the growing tendency to judge the Middle Ages 
with insight and sympathy. Voigt's future studies were deter- 
mined by his removal to Konigsberg, where he found the archives 
of early Prussia and the Teutonic Order. His History of Prussia 
to 1527 appeared in nine volumes, dedicated ' To the Fatherland.' 
It was an elevating task, he declared, to watch the heroism and 
sacrifices of our fathers in defence of their land. The hero of the 
book is Hermann von Salza. ' The supreme prize in research 
is when the spirit is raised to reverence and the heart is filled with 
enthusiasm at the sight of great and good men.' Voigt first 
narrated the early history of Prussia from the documents ; but 
he confined himself to the archives of the Order. He glorified 
the knights and despised their foes. He resented the charge of 
partisanship ; but the whole work is a typical product of the 
romantic age. Superior in learning to his master, he belongs 
equally to the pre-critical era. 

Of the historians in whose pages the heroic figures of Germany 
became familiar by far the most popular was Raumer. 2 The 
dominant influence in his early studies, as in those of most of 
his generation, was Johannes Muller, of whom he speaks with 
warm gratitude in his Memoirs. As a young man he chose the 
Hohenstaufen for his theme, and undertook a prolonged visit 
to the libraries of Italy in pursuit of material. When asked at 
the Vatican whether he was ' of our religion,' he adroitly replied 
that he was studying the Hohenstaufen and was of the religion 
of that time. He obtained permission to examine manuscripts, 
and used a number of Papal letters of the highest value. The 

1 See Lohmeyer's article in Allg. Deutsche Biog., and Dollinger's 
Akademische Vortrdge, vol. ii. 

2 See his Lebenserinnerungen, 1861 ; Ranke, Abhandlungen u. Versuche, 
Neue Sammlung, 578-81, 1888 ; and Reumont, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, 
chap. 3, 1885. Schack declared that his name was as immortal as Bar- 
barossa and Manfred, Fin halbes Jahrhunderl, vol. i. 208, 1888. 



74 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, book appeared in 1823-5, an d was eagerly read. It was the first 
V luminous and comprehensive treatment of a great epoch in 
German history. Sismondi had recently described the struggle 
of the Lombard cities and Barbarossa from the standpoint of the 
former, and in his pages the Hohenstaufen were tyrants. Raumer, 
on the other hand, recognised that both parties were fighting for 
a great principle. Of the two great rulers who dominate the 
drama, the picture of Barbarossa was the least successful ; but 
the brilliant personality of Frederick II, Stupor Mundi, was 
revealed to the world in his pages. The stage is European and 
more than European. Several dramas are in progress at the 
same time — the struggle of East and West, of the Empire and 
Papacy, of Imperialism and the Italian cities, of orthodoxy and 
heresy. Raumer fully understood that events are only the 
skeleton of history. Sketches of life and thought, of the Albi- 
genses and the Mendicant Orders, are scattered through the 
narrative, while the two concluding volumes are entirely 
devoted to culture. This was the most novel part of the 
whole work, dealing with the classes and the towns, law and 
economics, science and art. His survey of the organisation 
of the state, crown rights, personal and legal relations, was 
warmly praised by Ranke. The sixth volume, almost wholly 
devoted to the Church, was a notable achievement for a 
Protestant historian. 

A grave fault prevented the ' Hohenstaufen,' despite its shining 
merits, from entering the class of histories which survive their 
authors. It was written before the science of criticism was 
created. Raumer had conscientiously explored the printed and 
manuscript sources of his period ; but he had not the equip- 
ment necessary for their valuation. He had spent his early 
years in the civil service and approached history as an amateur. 
Stenzel rather unkindly spoke of it as ' a remarkable success 
for a man without any proper training.' He was never attracted 
by the methods of Wolf and Niebuhr, and the Middle Ages were 
still refracted through the lense of the romantic movement. 
Though new editions succeeded one another during the author's 
life and one appeared after his death, the authority of the work 
steadily diminished. Yet it did more than any other book to 
arouse interest in the Middle Ages, and was the parent of 
innumerable dramas and novels through which a knowledge 
of the heroic period of German history filtered down among 
the people. 

The highest level of merit among those who devoted them- 
selves to national history before the appearance of Ranke was 



THE MONUMENTA 75 

reached by Stenzel. 1 The dominant influence of his early life CHAP, 
was that of Johannes Muller. He was severely wounded in the v 
war of Liberation, and was among the first to promise support 
to Stein's project of the Monumenta. ' In 1810, when I began 
to teach, the idea seized me of writing the history of Germany 
from Charles the Great to Rudolf of Hapsburg. I wanted to 
tell my fellow-countrymen how bold and free their fathers were 
and how they maintained their independence.' He started in 
the middle, choosing a period in which the sources were numerous 
and stopping where Raumer had begun. His ' Franconian 
Emperors,' 1024-1125, was based on the first really critical 
examination of mediaeval sources. Giesebrecht later declared 
that no one had studied the period more profoundly or more 
impartially, adding that his book inaugurated the critical study 
of the Middle Ages. ' In many of the most famous works of the 
day,' wrote Stenzel, ' all sources are accepted which make history 
attractive. I defy anyone to show me a statement in my book 
which I cannot substantiate from the best authorities.' He 
emancipated himself from the romantic idealisation of the Middle 
Ages. The core of the work is the reign of Henry IV, whom he 
depicts as one of the greatest and best of German rulers. Unlike 
his friend Voigt, he contends that Hildebrand's desire to reform 
the Church was increasingly overlaid by the mad ambition to 
rule the world. The detailed narrative of the struggle ranks 
with Raumer's picture of Frederick II in interest, and surpasses 
it in critical value. ' I have worked at my book for seventeen 
years — the last eight of which were exclusively devoted to the 
sources of a hundred years. How much time a critical edition 
would have saved me, and how much have I missed for lack of it ! ' 
Though the work as a whole was superseded a generation later 
by the masterpiece of Giesebrecht, it takes its place among the 
half-dozen books to which historical science owes its origin. 

1 See the excellent life by his son, K. G. Stenzel, 1897. A biography 
of Johannes Muller, whose influence was supreme in the generation before 
Ranke, has been undertaken by Henking, vol. i., 1909. 



CHAPTER VI 



RANKE 



While the school of romantic nationalism was still in the as- 
cendant, a new spirit was introduced into the theory and practice 
of history. Born in 1795, Ranke l heard the thunder of the cannon 
of Auerstadt and saw the flying Germans, closely followed by the 
victorious French, pass through his native village. At school 
the boys copied Napoleon's bulletins on their slates. But the 
future historian was more interested in the past than the present. 
A native of Thuringian Saxony he was surrounded by historical 
memories. Memleben spoke of Henry the Fowler and Otto the 
Great, the Kyffhauser of Barbarossa. At Schulpforta he laid 
the foundation of the exact knowledge of ancient literature from 
which he derived unceasing satisfaction throughout life. He 
already possessed the imperturbable tranquillity which was to be 
an element in his fame. ' Our father,' wrote Heinrich, ' at 
first feared Leopold would be affected by the Greek tragedies ; 
but he regarded them purely as works of art, which he appreciated 

1 For the vast literature on Ranke see Helmolt, Ranke-Bibliographie, 
1910. His correspondence and memoranda were published in 1890 as 
Zur eigenen Lebensgeschichte. Much of biographical interest is to be found 
in Heinrich Ranke's Jugenderinnerungen, 1877 ; Hitzig's Ernst Ranke, 
1906 ; his son's recollections in Deutsche Revue, January-February, 1903 ; 
and forty letters in Deutsche Revue, 1904-6. The best of the larger mono- 
graphs is Guglia, Ranke's Leben u. Werke, 1893. Lorenz, L. v. Ranke, 1891, 
is too theoretical. The biography and essays in Dove's Ausgewdhlte 
Schriftchen, 1898, are of the highest value. Nalbandian, Ranke's 
Bildungsjahre u. Geschichtsauffassung, 1902, is useful. The best of all 
appreciations is by Sybel, Vortrdge u. Abhandlungen, 1897. The addresses 
of Giesebrecht, 1887, and Moriz Ritter, 1896, are important. Reumont's 
article, Historisches Jahrbuch der Gorres-Gesellschaft, 1886, contains their 
correspondence. Among foreign estimates may be mentioned those of 
Reuss, in Revue Historique, vol. xxxi., and Guilland, in L'Allemagne Nouvelle 
et ses Historiens, 1899. Winckler's L. v. Ranke, Lichtstrahlen aus seinen 
Werken, 1885, classifies his more notable utterances. 



RANKE 



17 



without allowing them to excite his feelings.' At Leipsic he CHAP, 
studied theology and classical philology, the few historical VI 
lectures that he attended repelling him by their lack of grasp 
and reflection. He learned to read the Old Testament in Hebrew, 
but. cared little for dogmatic studies. He enjoyed the lectures 
of Gottfried Hermann on the Greek poets, but devoted most of 
his attention to the ancient historians, above all Thucydides. 
v/Niebuhr, he afterwards declared, convinced him that historians 
could exist in the modern world. He found time for a little 
philosophy, reading Kant with interest and Fichte with admira- 
tion. When Stenzel asked the young student if he intended to 
devote himself to history, he replied in the negative. The seven 
years spent as teacher in the Gymnasium at Frankfurt on the 
Oder were more decisive than school or university ; for it was 
there that he turned from philology to history. He never 
regretted his long apprenticeship, and maintained that it was 
impossible to familiarise young men too much with classical 
antiquity. No historian has approached his task with a more 
universal equipment of culture. 

Ranke was turned to history not by current events, like u-- 
Niebuhr and the patriotic school, but by his professional duties. 
He loved to lecture on Livy and Herodotus, read Niebuhr again 
with increased admiration and welcomed Bockh's picture of the 
Athenian State. He gradually extended his vision beyond the 
ancient world to the V olkerw cinder ung and the Middle Ages, 
composing fragments on the Carolingian era from the Chronicles. 
The first indication of a book dates from 1820, when he wrote 
that he wished to learn something of the life of the nations in 
the fifteenth century, of the new sprouting of the seeds sown 
by antiquity. In reading Guicciardini and Paolo Giovio he j 
found their differences too great to be reconciled, and resolved 
to clear up the difficulty by studying the other main authorities 
of the period. This done he determined to write his own account 
of the time. Thus the ' Histories of the Romance and Teutonic 
Peoples ' grew out of an accident, and was written rather for the 
author's satisfaction than for the public. In rebutting the charge ^-^ 
of lack of philosophic and religious interest he declared that it \s 
was precisely that which had driven him to history. His letters 
to his brother Heinrich repeatedly expressed the hope to reach 
nearer to God. ' Every action testifies to Him, every momenta 
and above all the connection of history.' The service of history 
was a holy work, purifying the soul. ' We remove the shell 
of things and reach the essence.' This kernel was human per- 
sonality, revealed in action, suffering, effort. He was particularly 



y8 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, attracted by the human side of history. ' It is so sweet to revel 

VI in the wealth of all the centuries, to meet all the heroes face 

to face, to live through everything again.' His debut revealed 

both his interest in personality and the religious complexion of 

his mind. He had often declared the deciding factor in history 

t/to be men of action ; and the titles of his chapters emphasise 
his sense of their importance. We hear less of the peoples than 
of their princes, less of conditions than of actions. The Intro- 
ductory Essay endeavoured to establish the unity of the Romance 
and Germanic peoples, dating from the V olkerwanderung, ex- 
pressing itself in the Crusades and in the common institutions and 
ideals of Latin Christianity. Thus a single process of develop- 
ment, a single life might be traced. Regarding history as an 
object lesson in ethics and religion, he depicts the shameless 
moral corruption of Italy as sealing her doom. 

Though a good deal of theology floated on the surface, the 
main body of the work was unaffected. In one of the precious 
fragments dictated in old age Ranke declared that his discovery 
of the difference in the portraits of Louis XI and Charles the 
Bold in ' Quentin Durward ' and in Commines constituted an 
epoch in his life. ' I found by comparison that the truth was 
more interesting and beautiful than the romance. I turned 
away from it and resolved to avoid all invention and imagination 
in my works and to stick to facts.' The preface announced, in 
words which have become classical, the spirit in which the book 
Was written. ' History has had assigned to it the task of judging 

'fjthe past, of instructing the present for the benefit of the ages to 
come. To such lofty functions this work does not aspire. Its 
aim is merely to show what actually occurred.' l The great 
figures of an age rich in commanding personalities are soberly 
portrayed, the peoples surveyed without bias. His passionless 
tone is not the result of indifference. When judgment is pro- 
nounced, it is the more weighty from its rarity. On the death 
of Alexander VI he writes : ' A limit is set to human crime. He 
died and became the abomination of the centuries.' He accepts 
every manifestation of life — the gay court of Charles VIII, the 
fanaticism of Spain, the majesty of the Venetian aristocracy. 
The book constituted a distinct advance in the objective treat- 
ment of European history, and will always retain its interest as 
the earliest work of the greatest of modern historians. Yet its 
merits are perhaps a little below its reputation. It is essentially 
a compilation. As its title indicates, it is a collection of histories 
rather than a history. His intention had been to extend his 
1 ' Er will bloss zeigen wie es eigentlich gewesen.' 



RANKE 79 

survey to 1535 ; but he became increasingly conscious of the CHAP, 
limitations of a work resting exclusively on printed authorities, VI 
and never continued it. It thus remains a fragment — a con- 
venient summary of the main external facts of twenty years of 
European history, which adds nothing to the knowledge and 
little to the interpretation of the age. Hjklf a century later he 
was persuaded with difficulty to include it in his collected works. 

If the beginning of the critical era of historiography is com- 
monly held to date from the publication of Ranke's first work 
in 1824, it. is owing rather to the technical appendix than to the 
narrative. In this famous discussion of his authorities he first 
applied to modern history the principles of Niebuhr. There 
was nothing new in his maxims that the nearest witness to the 
event was the best, and that the letters of the actors were of more 
value than the anecdotes of the chronicler. The novelty of his 
method lay in his determination to seize the personality of the 
writer and to inquire whence he derived his information. ' Some 
will copy the ancients, some will seek instruction for the future,""" 
some will attack or defend, some will only wish to record facts. 
Each must be separately studied.' Applying this method the 
critic reached some startling results. Guicciardini he pronounced \_^ 
wholly unworthy of his reputation. Much of his material was 
copied from other books, much was false, much was doubtful, 
speeches were invented, treaties were altered, important facts 
misrepresented. Ranke admires his fine political instinct, his 
universal outlook, his freedom from ecclesiastical bias ; but 
he denies him nearly all the virtues of an historian. Next in 
interest was the discussion of Machiavelli, whose ' Prince ' was 
a tract for the times, prescribing poison only because they 
were out of joint. The analysis of the life and the temper of the 
two great Florentines inaugurated the serious study of their 
historical writings ; and the dissection of the lesser authorities 
enabled future historians for the first time to use them intelligently. 
He never wearied of expressing his debt to Niebuhr, whose bust 
occupied the place of honour in his study ; but he declared in old 
age that in his critical disquisitions he had not thought of Niebuhr 
or of anybody else. ' My practice arose by a sort of necessity, 
in its own way.' 

The reception of the work of the unknown Frankfurt teacher 
was highly favourable. The only hostile criticism came from 
Leo, who disparaged its learning, its philosophy and its style, ^ 
Ranke was fully conscious of the imperfections of his book, and 
the Preface hinted that it might seem hard, disjointed and 
colourless. But its merits were obvious, and were rewarded by a 



80 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, call to Berlin. 1 ' It is as if the door to my true life at last opens, 
VI as if I can at last spread my wings,' he wrote. But though the 
University was then at its zenith, there was no great scholar to 
vindicate the claims of modern history. Ranke was only Pro- 
fessor Extr aor dinar ius, and his lectures were delivered to small 
audiences. Yet the friendship of Savigny and the salon of 
Rahel and Varnhagen opened a new world. The mystic Schu- 
bert 3 has drawn a charming picture of the young Professor at 
this moment, merry, alert, sunny, a delightful companion. 
The historian later attributed the increased polish of his writings 
in part to his acquaintance with the intellectual women of Berlin. 
But his greatest joy was in the inexhaustible possibilities of the 
archives. Among their treasures were numerous volumes of 
the relations of Venetian ambassadors in the second quarter of the 
sixteenth century. He at once saw that these and other manu- 
scripts pointed the way to much more serious studies than had 
gone to the making of his first book. His acquaintance with 
the Venetian reports constituted an epoch in his life ; for they 
revealed in a flash that the history of modern Europe must be 
rewritten in the light of fresh and contemporary material. They 
opened to him a spring of inexhaustible fertility with which he 
could resuscitate the scenes and actors of three centuries. Finally 
they confirmed his habit of writing history with the detachment 
of an onlooker, and he caught from the diplomatists of the 
Republic something of their reserve and their fine shades of 
judgment. 

With the aid of the Venetian reports the young Professor 
quickly constructed his ' Ottomans and the Spanish Monarchy of 
the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,' designed as the first 
of a series of works bearing the general title of ' Princes and Peoples 
of Southern Europe.' Like its predecessor the new work con- 
tained a picture gallery of rulers and statesmen ; but he now 
undertakes a study of conditions as the background of events. 
Though less than one hundred pages are devoted to Turkey, 
the Ottoman system, military and civil, stands out in bold relief. 
The constitution, trade, finance and administration of the Spanish 
Empire in the Old and New World are described in greater detail. 
Yet the recognition of conditions does not diminish his sense of 
the importance of personality. In Turkey he shows how every- 
thing depended on the Sultans, and carefully portrays their 
different characters. In Spain he pronounces the princes the 

1 See the correspondence in Lenz, Geschichte der Universitat zu Berlin, 
vol. iv., 457-76, I9i°« 

- Selbstbiogvaphie, vol. iii., 603-5, 1856. 



RANKE 81 

mainspring of the vast machine, and traces the decay of the CHAP. 
seventeenth century in large measure to the degeneracy of VI 
the dynasty. It is one of the merits of the book to have offered 
the first intelligible picture of Philip II. The study of Don John 
of Austria revealed a new lightness of touch. Bettina, Goethe's 
' Kind,' described the work as wunderschon. If that was the 
language of friendship, the book was none the less an advance 
on his own earlier achievement and that of contemporary 
historians of modern Europe. 

As the ' Latin and Teutonic Nations ' brought the call to 
Berlin, the ' Princes and Peoples ' procured the supreme privilege 
of subsidised travel. Starting in 1827 Ranke did not return for 
nearly four years. ' The object of my scientific journey,' he wrote, 
' is to discover and use unknown sources for the history of modern 
States, especially those of Southern Europe.' His immediate 
object was to obtain material for an Italian volume of the ' Princes 
and Peoples.' But before reaching Italy he was to be drawn 
aside for a time into a new and almost unknown world. During 
his year's residence at Vienna he made the acquaintance of the 
scholars who were endeavouring to further Slavonic culture, among 
them Kopitar, the archivist, and his friend Wuk Stephanowich, 
who, after taking part in the revolution, had left his native 
Servia when the Turkish power was restored. Wuk's collection 
of Serb folk-songs had attracted the notice of Jacob Grimm, who 
translated a selection, and of Goethe, who devoted an essay to 
them. Ranke was already interested in the Near East, and 
entered eagerly into the problems and aspirations of the Slavonic 
world. The ' History of the Revolutions in Servia ' was written 
in Vienna. In the preface to the third edition, published in 
1879, he declared that the work was based on an outline by 
Wuk, which was confirmed by personal examination of the 
witnesses whom Wuk had used. A detailed study of the cus- 
toms, religion and poetry explained how the Serbs had survived 
centuries of subjection. The narrative ended with the revolt of 
Milosh Obrenovich and the beginnings of an ordered polity. In 
later editions the story was brought down to date and enriched 
by wider study. Though not a liberal Ranke was deeply con- 
vinced of the incapacity of the Turk to govern Christian peoples, \^r- 
and watched with sympathy their efforts to overthrow his rule. 
The book broke virgin soil. No Teutonic scholar was in a position 
to pronounce a critical judgment on the work ; but its power was 
unmistakable. ' This little book,' wrote Niebuhr to Perthes, 
its publisher, ' is the best contemporary history we possess. 
Ranke has got rid of everything which offended in his earlier 



82 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, manner.' Goethe, to whom the author sent a copy, was not less 
VI pleased, and expressed a wish to know more of the author. Though 
not one of his most celebrated works, and perhaps a little too 
rosy in tone, it was a genuine contribution to knowledge and, in 
its enlarged form, remains an indispensable guide through one 
of the less known chapters of modern history. 

Ranke's sojourn in Vienna introduced him to another set of 
influences which proved of permanent importance in the develop- 
ment of his mind and thought. He had given little attention to 
politics before he came to Berlin ; and in Rahel's salon he met 
Borne and other men and women of radical tendencies. Without 
committing himself he began to seek in the French Revolution 
the key to French politics and to the conflicting schools of thought 
throughout Europe. It was with his interest thoroughly aroused 
and his views only partially formed that he made the acquaintance 
of Gentz, to whom he brought an introduction from Rahel. That 
brilliant being, once the ornament of her salon and the inter- 
preter of Burke, was now sixty-four. Though not in office he 
stood at Metternich's right hand. In repeated conversations 
with Gentz Ranke learned much of the secret history of the last 
generation ; but his greatest service to the historian was to 
introduce him to Metternich. While rejecting the absolutism 
favoured by the all-powerful Minister and his henchman, he 
left Vienna with an immensely enlarged knowledge of European 
politics and a vivid realisation of the essential unity of the 
European system. 

Despite the attractions of Servian history and political 
discussion, the greater part of Ranke's time in Vienna was spent 
in the archives. He was delighted at the wealth of treasures 
from Venice which had not been restored. An unknown history 
of Europe seemed to open out before him. Among the jewels 
was Sanuto's diary, which no one had yet seen. He found that 
the statutes of the State Inquisition copied by Daru from manu- 
scripts in Paris were forged in the seventeenth century. As the 
spurious statutes had left a deep stain on the fame of the Republic, 
he was glad to reveal their true character. His researches were 
continued in Venice itself, where he began and where he was to 
end his Italian journey. The main object of the historian in 
obtaining permission to visit the Venetian archives was not so 
much to study the history of the Republic as to procure material 
for the series of works on European history which had begun to 
shape themselves in his mind. The researches begun at the 
Frari were continued in the libraries of Rome and Florence, 
whence he took home materials which were to be of use throughout 



RANKE 83 

his life. His plan of an Italian volume of the ' Princes and Peoples ' CHAP, 
was soon abandoned, as he found that the Popes were enough VI 
for a separate work. The treasures of the Vatican were closed 
to him ; but he found compensation in the liberality of the great 
families. ' Unless I am misinformed,' he wrote, ' the value of 
the Vatican sinks into insignificance compared with the wealth 
of private collections, above all the Barberini.' He found all 
and more than all that he had hoped from his Italian 
journey. ' I am satisfied and know for what I live ; my 
breast fills with joyful emotion when I think of the happi- 
ness of constructing an important work. I swear daily to 
carry it out, without swerving a finger's breadth from the 
truth as I see it.' 

During his residence of over two years in Italy the historian 
published nothing except a study of Don Carlos, exploding the 
scandal which had lain heavy on the memory of Philip II. His 
' Venice at the End of the Sixteenth Century,' though it did not 
appear till 1878, was doubtless written in Italy. He showed 
that her historical life never corresponded to the conception of 
the theorists who presented the constitution as a perfect and 
logical whole, a philosopher's system. A second essay, published 
in 183 1, proved that the conspiracy of 1616 was the work of 
mercenaries who planned to seize and plunder the city, not a 
far-reaching design of Spain as it had appeared in the pages of 
Daru. A third, on the Venetians in Morea, sketched the admin- 
istration of part of the oversea Empire. Among other articles 
conceived or partly written in Italy were those on Savonarola, 
Filippo Strozzi and Consalvi. The Italian journey holds as 
prominent a place in the life of Ranke as in that of Goethe. He 
remarked later that he had never learned or thought more than 
during those crowded years. He crossed the Alps carrying 
with him a deeper insight into the political development of 
modern Europe than any historian had ever possessed. 

Ranke returned to Berlin resolved to devote his entire energies 
to historical teaching and composition ; but the first few years 
were largely claimed by a task which he had not foreseen. The 
French Revolution of 1830 had given such a powerful impetus 
to democratic ideas in Germany that the Prussian Government 
became alarmed. Perthes, who was a keen politician as well 
as a successful publisher, suggested to the Foreign Minister the 
foundation of a journal to combat French influences. The 
proposal that Ranke should undertake the work probably 
emanated from Savigny. His intention was to steer a middle 
course between rationalism and traditionalism. In this spirit 

G 3 



V 



§4 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, the Historico-political Review was launched in 1832. l The 
VI editor was the chief contributor, but Savigny and other eminent 
men assisted. It quickly became clear that the ideal of a con- 
servative rival to the activity of Rotteck and to Heine's brilliant 
letters from Paris to the Allgemeine Zeitung would not be fulfilled. 
But the Review, though it exerted but little influence in Prussia 
and none at all beyond its frontiers, played none the less an im- 
portant part in the life of the historian. His gospel was that of 
Savigny and the Restoration. Government was only in very 
small degree a matter of outward form. Constitutions were no 
panacea, and certainly did not suit every country. Grammar 
could not make a language, aesthetics a poem, or political science 
a state. The republican idea had been introduced into the 
Old World by the American War of Independence, and had been 
trumpeted abroad by France. Even more poisonous was the 
doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, which threatened the 
stability of every government in Europe. Like Niebuhr he 
believed in maintaining local privileges and institutions, and 
preferred estates to parliaments. He was well content with the 
honest and efficient government of Prussia as he knew it. His 
historical contributions to the Review were more numerous and 
more important than those which bore a directly political 
character ; but some of them taught and were intended to teach 
political lessons. The famous essay on the Great Powers ex- 
pressed his deep conviction of the individuality of States and of 
the danger threatened by the levelling rationalism of the French 
Revolution. He proceeded to express his fundamental notions 
of the development of humanity. History, he declared, was not 
such chaos as it appeared at first sight. There were creative 
forces, moral energies at work which gave it value and meaning. 
States were intellectual entities, creations of the human spirit, 
thoughts of God. No people could live for itself, and the character 
of each only developed in contact with the whole. The main 
burthen of his message was the duty of States to safeguard their 
individuality by developing along the lines of their historic 
growth. 

The Review came to an end in 1836. Its circulation was too 
small to cover expenses, and its influence was nugatory. Ranke 
had neither the taste nor the capacity for polemics. His con- 

1 The fullest account of Ranke as a publicist is in Diethe's massive 
monograph, Ranke als Politiker, 191 1 ; cp. Meinecke's Weltbiirgertum 
u. Nationalstaat, chap. 12, 1908. Varrentrapp's article, ' Ranke's His- 
torisch-politische Zeitschrift,' Hist. Zeitschrift, vol. xcix., is a useful 
summary. 






RANKE 85 

servative attitude and his unflinching opposition to French ideas CHAP, 
lost him his liberal friends. Varnhagen began to copy unfriendly VI 
gossip into his diary, and Alexander Humboldt remarked that he 
had gone over to the reaction. ' Poor Ranke,' wrote Heine, 
with his usual brutality, ' a pretty talent to paint little historical 
figures and paste them together, a good soul, as good-natured as 
mutton.' Yet the Review was not to the taste of the Gerlachs, 
Radowitz and other reactionaries who surrounded the Crown 
Prince. He gravely underestimated the value of liberal ideas ; 
but he was a disciple of Burke, not of Haller, and he never forgot 
the importance of associating the people in some form or other 
with the work of government. Though he wrote important 
memoranda for the guidance of Frederick William IV and his 
successor and was consulted by Maximilian of Bavaria, he never 
again came forward to take an active part in the political con- 
troversies of his country. A last echo of the Review may be 
heard in the Inaugural lecture delivered in 1836, on his appoint- 
ment as Ordinary Professor, on the relations of History and 
Politics. Every State possessed its individuality. The states- 
man must know his State and its history, as a steersman must 
know not only the course but the vessel. Universal doctrines 
of government, dear to the eighteenth century, were worthless 
and dangerous. Armed with these complementary doctrines 
of the individuality of States and the unity of the European 
family, Ranke now pressed forward with the chief work of his 
life, the study of the leading Powers in their internal develop- 
ment and in their relation to one another. 



II 



While occupied with the Review, Ranke found time to write 
a book which gave him his place among the great historians of the 
world. The first volume of the ' History of the Popes ' appeared 
in 1834, the second and third in 1836. His object was to exhibit 
the Papacy as a factor in the development of Europe, trans- 
forming itself like other members of the European system. An 
objective study was no longer difficult. ' What is there in the 
present day which can render the history of the papal power of 
importance to us ? Not its relation to ourselves, for it no longer 
exercises any essential influence nor creates in us any appre- 
hension. It can now inspire us with no other interest than what 
results from the process of its history and its former influence.' 
This tranquillity of spirit is consistently maintained throughout 



t- 



86 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

the work. Profoundly penetrated with the inner unity of all 
Christian Churches, he could afford to look with tolerance on 
external differences. He writes with sympathy and admiration 
of the great figures and movements of the mother Church. His 
irenic nature reveals itself in his account of the moments when 
reconciliation seemed within sight, and he writes with admiration 
of Contarini and the peacemakers. The Popes of the Counter- 
Reformation become human and intelligible. He gladly recog- 
nises genuine religious feeling, as in Loyola and the Jesuits. He 
was not the first Protestant to write sympathetically of the 
Roman Church. Johannes Miiller had eulogised the Church of 
the Middle Ages as the representative of intellectual liberty against 
temporal despotism, and the romanticists had expressed en- 
thusiasm for popes and saints. Ranke treated the Papacy as a 
great historical phenomenon, without regard to the controversies 
of the day and without romantic enthusiasm. This method of 
approach rendered possible the fruitful investigation of some of 
the most important tracts of European history, and constitutes 
the first title of the book to immortality. 

The ' History of the Popes ' is notable not less for its wealth 
of information than for its objective treatment. That he seized 
the main outlines of three centuries so clearly that subsequent 
research has done little more than fill them in was owing not 
only to the new material which he collected but to the critical 
treatment of his sources, printed and unprinted. The analyses 
of Sarpi and Pallavicini are classical examples of his art. In 
approaching the vast compilation of the great Venetian he de- 
clares himself to have been seized with a sort of terror. Difficult 
enough to master in any case, the reader must be on his guard at 
every step ; for his chief authorities were reports which have 
since disappeared, and he saw the Papacy in the light of the quarrel 
with the Republic. Pallavicini's reply contained many docu- 
ments from the Vatican, but was rather a polemic than a history. 
The truth about the Council of Trent could only be obtained from 
contemporary documents, the vast majority of which they had 
never seen. 

Armed with a tranquil judgment and a critical knowledge 
of the sources Ranke entered on his narrative. The Introduction 
briefly traces the Papacy through the Middle Ages, emphasising 
its work as the great unifier of European civilisation. The 
narrative broadens in the fifteenth century and deals in detail 
with the foundation of the Papal States as one of the Powers 
of Italy. The kernel of the book is the Counter-Reformation, 
of which Ranke was the first authoritative interpreter. The 



RANKE 87 

revival of spiritual life, the re-conquest of Southern Germany, CHAP, 
the foundation of the Orders make a brilliant picture. There v ^ 
is something epic in the great struggle when a new race of rulers, 
succeeding the sinners and triflers of the Renaissance, rolled 
back the tide of Protestantism. The title of the work, ' History 
of the Popes,' not History of the Papacy, emphasises the his- 
torian's interest in the concrete realities of human character £S 
but he never forgot to show how the individual is determined by 
the atmosphere and traditions of his office. ' Of what little 
importance,' he exclaims, ' is even the strongest mortal in the face 
of world-history ! ' Less dramatic but of greater novelty was 
the examination of the internal life of the Papal States, their 
administration and finance, the growth and influence of the 
princely families, their buildings and their patronage of art. 
No part of the work is more brilliant than that which describes 
the achievements, at home and abroad, of Sixtus V. In the 
seventeenth century the Papacy became more and more an 
Italian State, and its influence waned. This part of the work 
contains the digression on Christina of Sweden, one of the most 
highly wrought portraits in Ranke's gallery. The survey of 
the eighteenth century is a mere sketch. In its original form 
the work ended with the Restoration ; but in revising it for the 
collected works forty years later the author continued his rapid 
narrative till the fall of the Temporal Power. 

The ' History of the Popes' was not only a great achievement of 
historical research but a perfect work of art. He had now reached 
the maturity of his powers. Without attempting flights of elo- 
quence, his luminous and measured style produces an effect of 
rare power. From time to time he interrupts the thread of his 
narrative to utter a grave reflection on the significance of the 
scenes he is describing. It was while engaged on the ' Popes ' that 
he wrote, ' No history can be written but universal history. 
I am enchanted by the loftiness and logic of the development 
and, if I may say so, by the ways of God.' The work for the 
first time revealed his resources of research and judgment, 
narrative and portraiture. It combined spaciousness with a 
mastery of detail, a faculty of generalisation with minute 
accuracy. It was quickly translated into every civilised language 
and became one of the indispensable books of historical literature. 
Hofler and Theiner took up arms for the Roman Church ; but 
Dollinger and other Catholics expressed their admiration of 
its tone and learning. In the Protestant world criticism was 
to come later from the school which desired to use history 
as a bludgeon. Gustav Freytag, lamenting the dispassionate 



88 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, treatment of the foes of Protestantism, pronounced it to lack the 
VI last touch of historic truth. 

The charge of indifference to Protestantism was to be rebutted 
in the work which followed. In the preface to his ' German 
History in the Time of the Reformation ' he declared that the 
public life of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries rested on the 
Imperial Diet, which had never been properly investigated. ' I 
desired to study the development of the constitution, and in 1836 
I found what I sought.' Ninety-six volumes, extending from 
1414 to 1613 and containing the reports of the Frankfurt deputies, 
provided the key. He told Savigny that he felt an obligation 
to place the history of the origins of Protestantism beside his 
picture of Catholicism. He supplemented his researches at Frank- 
furt by discoveries at Weimar, Dresden and Dessau, while at 
Brussels he found a mass of correspondence of Charles V. At 
Paris he consulted part of the Simancas archives which had not 
been returned. He also utilised a good deal of the material 
which he had brought from Italy. ' Anyone,' he wrote, ' who 
has a natural tendency to impartiality must feel himself assisted 
by this juxtaposition of opposites to give each his rights.' To 
a far greater degree than its predecessors, the ' Reformation ' was 
based on manuscript materials. ' I see a time coming when we 
shall build modern history no longer on the accounts even of 
contemporary historians, except where they possessed original 
knowledge, much less on derivative writers, but on the relations 
of eye-witnesses and the original documents.' 

Five volumes appeared in rapid succession between 1839 an< ^ 
1843, a volume of extracts from authorities following in 1847. 
A foundation is laid by a detailed investigation of the Imperial 
Constitution and the attempts to reform it. If on reaching 
the Reformation he devotes far more attention to political than 
to theological problems, it was in no sense because he under- 
estimated its religious aspect. ' History is religion,' he wrote, 
' or at any rate there is the closest connection between them. 
As there is no human activity of intellectual importance which 
does not originate in some relation to God and divine things, so 
there is no nation whose political life is not continually raised and 
guided by religious ideas.' From the thirteenth century the 
Church had been decaying ; the yoke of dogma was becoming 
too heavy to bear, worship was growing paganised. ' I do not 
know if any reasonable man can seriously wish this system to have 
lasted unchanged.' The kernel of the Reformation was the 
return to the Christian revelation, and the personality of Luther 
was the deciding factor. Seldom does Ranke speak so warmly 



RANKE 89 

of any human being. His deed, he declares, was the result of a CHAP. 
purely spiritual struggle. Far from being a reckless innovator, VI 
he was one of the greatest conservatives that ever lived ; but he 
had the strength to hold on to the ground he had won, unlike 
Melanchthon, who was too ready to compromise. Though he once 
more writes with sympathy of the Ratisbon discussions, he does 
not really regret the failure of reunion. ' The parallel progress of 
European culture has taken the place of ecclesiastical unity.' 
His tenderness to the reformers appears when he reaches the 
double marriage of Philip of Hesse and its quasi-approval by 
Luther and Melanchthon. Yet the portrait of Charles V is also 
drawn with marked sympathy. He had sketched his beginnings 
in the ' Princes and Peoples,' and he now followed him to his 
abdication. He admired his fidelity to the impossible ideal of the 
unity of Christendom. The book is a contribution to the history 
of European politics as well as to that of Germany in the era of 
the Reformation. We read of the Turks at Vienna, the sack of 
Rome, the Reformation in Switzerland, the conspiracy of Wullen- 
weber. No work on the German Reformation has ever had such 
a wide scope. 

Though it never obtained the same European popularity as 
the ' Popes,' its success in Germany itself was far greater. The 
one belonged to the world, the other was the property of the 
Fatherland. Dove has well compared its position as a national 
work to that of Macaulay's History. Critics who had detected 
a lack of warmth in the ' Popes ' were delighted at the vigorous 
convictions of its successor. ' In reading the earlier works/ 
declares Sybel, ' my enjoyment is exactly the same as in visiting 
a gallery of excellent pictures and statuary. Utterly different is 
my feeling when I open the " Reformation," which is impregnated 
with the enthusiasm of a German patriot for the greatest act of 
the German spirit.' Treitschke pronounces it his masterpiece, 
its style warmed by the love of country. Moriz Ritter asserts 
that he never reached the same level again. The historian him- 
self did not wholly agree with these verdicts. At the age of 
ninety he remarked that he had been told that it was far inferior 
to the ' Popes.' ' I felt that too. It seemed to me impossible to 
make a readable book out of the Acts of the Reichstag and 
theology. I did not try for readers in the great world, but strove 
to satisfy German erudition.' The historian's instinct was not 
much at fault. It is a less perfect work, and the progress of 
research has treated it less kindly. From Dollinger and Janssen 
Germany was to learn that his view of the eve of the Reforma- 
tion was too dark and of the Reformation itself too rosy. Luther's 



90 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, fame does not stand where it did. We learn singularly little about 
VI the mass of the people, their conditions and their aspirations ; and 
the chapter on the Peasants' Revolt is one of the weakest. 
Though the book is a political history, more care should have 
been taken to indicate the doctrinal points at issue. Except 
for a discussion of Justification by Faith on the occasion of the 
meeting of the Council of Trent and of the controversies of Flacius 
and Major, there is scarcely any theology in its pages. 

The ' Reformation,' the reception of which was ' beyond all ex- 
pectation,' was followed by the least successful and least interest- 
ing of Ranke's larger works. His first intention was to study 
the French Revolution ; but on reaching Paris in 1843 he failed 
to obtain access to the archives he needed, and stumbled on the 
despatches of Valori, French ambassador at Berlin during the 
early years of Frederick the Great. Returning home he plunged 
into the Prussian State archives ; but he soon found that to 
understand the work of the Great King it was necessary to 
explore the activities of his father. An introductory survey of 
the growth of Prussia was added, and the ' Nine Books of Prussian 
History ' appeared in 1847-8. The work was a study of the rise 
of a Great Power, with special reference to the reign of Frederick 
William I and the early years of his son. Ranke was born in 
Saxony, and lacked enthusiasm for his adopted country. He 
always remained a German, with a friendly feeling for Austria 
rare among Prussian historians. Indeed he was a dualist till 
Bismarck converted him. The coolness of the tone' struck 
and still strikes every reader. The King of Prussia was dis- 
satisfied with the first two volumes, but approved the third. 
It is a business-like, colourless narrative, lacking not only charm 
but movement. But though never a popular favourite, it pos- 
sessed solid merits. As Prussian historiographer he was the first 
to be allowed the use of the State papers, which had been closed 
to Preuss. In the words of Koser, 1 the final arbiter, it extended 
and deepened the knowledge of the first half of the eighteenth 
century as no work before it. Its greatest achievement was to 
reveal the personality and significance of Frederick William. 3 
Brushing aside the gossip of Wilhelmina, he depicted the King 
as the founder of the Prussian administrative machine. In his 
study of Frederick the Great, which ended with 1748, he reveals 

1 In Forschungen zur Brandenburgischen u. Preussischen Geschichte, 
vol. i. 

2 His reading of the King was attacked by Hausser (Ranke's ' Preus- 
sische Geschichte,' Ges. Schriften, vol. i., 1869), and Zimmermann, Die 
neueste Preussische Geschichtschreibung, 1848. 



RANKE 91 

no hostility to Austria. He refuses to discuss the legal question CHAP, 
of the claim to Silesia, adding the curious words, ' Happily this is, v * 
not the task of the historian.' He fully recognises the particu- 
larism of Prussia, and finds no trace of the national policy with 
which Droysen was to credit her. There was not less new 
material than in the ' Reformation ' ; but the impression left by 
the book is somewhat lifeless. It is an almost purely political 
narrative. The sketch of the Aufkldrung is curiously meagre. 
The fascinating ' digressions ' which had lightened the ' Popes ' 
are absent. ' I am not surprised at Ranke's failure,' wrote 
Carlyle to Varnhagen. ' If I was a Prussian or even a German 
I should protest against his Frederick the Great.' It was con- 
scientious but uninspiring, and it was quickly overshadowed 
by the massive treatise of Droysen. He was grieved by the cold 
reception of a work to which he had devoted patient research ; -"- 
but the disappointment of the public was largely due to the 
expectations which his own masterpieces had taught it to cherish. 

During his sojourn in Italy Ranke had resolved to write the 
history of France and England in their universal aspects ; and 
to this double task he devoted the greater part of the next twenty 
years. In 1850 he revisited Paris, and was delighted at the 
wealth of the material that he found. ' I am astonished,' he 
wrote, ' that the French leave it to me to discover part of their 
history.' The French History began to appear in 1853. Great 
States and peoples, declared the preface, possessed a double 
character, one national, the other belonging to the destinies of the 
world. The universal side of France was particularly prominent, 
for political ferments had often originated there. 'Ambitious, 
warlike, incited by national pride, the French have kept their 
neighbours in constant excitement, sometimes liberating the 
oppressed, more often oppressing the free.' This reading of 
French psychology is repeated at intervals throughout the work. 
'It is peculiar to France,' he declares in commenting on the 
adventures of Francis I, ' from century to century to break 
through the circle of legality.' Yet though the tone of the 
book is not altogether friendly, it is free from the disparagement 
which disfigures the pages of Sybel and Treitschke. Ranker' 
wrote not as a German but as a European. 

The detailed narrative begins with the sixteenth century, 
the connecting link between mediaeval and modern France being 
found in the elaboration of a monarchical system from Philip 
Augustus onwards. In the religious wars of the sixteenth cen- 
tury his sympathies are with the Politiques. He speaks severely ^ 
of the native duplicity of Catholicism, and declares there had 



92 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, been nothing like the massacre of St. Bartholomew since Sulla's 
VI proscriptions. Yet he does not blame the apostasy of Henri IV. 
With the accession of the Bourbons the stream reaches its greatest 
breadth. The character and policy of the King and Sully's 
economic reforms are minutely studied. The vanity and greed 
of Mazarin are emphasised, the greatness and ruthlessness of 
Richelieu impressively suggested. The picture of the reign of 
Louis XIV, the culmination of the absolute monarchy which is 
the main theme of the work, was the first adequate presentation 
of the Augustan age. While condemning his foreign policy, he 
emphasises the services of the King to literature, science and 
art. He was one of the first to do justice to the great qualities 
of Madame de Maintenon. With the death of Louis XIV the 
end is in sight, and the narrative closes with a brief sketch of his 
successor. 

Learned Frenchmen, declared Ranke, had long remarked how 
insecure was the foundation of their traditional history ; but he 
was the first to demonstrate it in detail. His researches in the 
archives not only of France but of Italy, Germany, Belgium, 
England and Spain enabled him to look all round his subject. 
The most abiding result was to emancipate French history 
from the memoir-writers. No part is more admirable than the 
detailed analysis of its most famous authorities. Davila's 
' Historyof theCivil Wars'came largelyfrom De Thou. Richelieu's 
Memoirs were almost wholly spurious, those of De Retz genuine 
but grossly misleading. On reaching Saint -Simon he emphasises 
the late date of composition and the violence of his pre- 
judices, and confronts him with the contemporary authority 
of Dangeau and the correspondence of Charlotte of Orleans with 
her German relatives. The French History, with its mass of 
new material and its wonderful gallery of portraits, was welcomed 
nowhere more heartily than in France. Saint Rene Taillandier, 
who knew and admired all his books, sung his praises in the Revue 
des Deux Mondes, and Thiers hailed him as the greatest historian 
in Germany and perhaps in Europe. 1 

1 The following criticism of the French History, despite its exaggeration, 
is of interest. ' Ten years have passed,' wrote Gindely to Helfert from 
Simancas in 1861, ' since I became acquainted with Ranke' s writings ; 
and I accepted the general opinion that he had made magnificent dis- 
coveries in foreign archives. But I found myself obliged to go critically 
through the Popes and the French History. The shallowness of his studies 
in the latter is astonishing. Not only is he lacking in a complete knowledge 
of the printed literature, but he even resorts to deception, wishing to make 
his readers believe that he has worked through the archives. The chief 
of these, the archives of the Foreign Office, he does not indeed cite, for he 



RANKE 93 

Ranke passed from France to England, to which he devoted CHAP, 
his longest work of research. His wife was English, and Macau- VI 
lay's essay had made his name a household word. Presenting 
an introduction from the King of Prussia to the Prince Consort 
the historian remarked, ' I come to study ' ; and the Prince 
gallantly replied, ' And you are studied here.' He explored 
the archives not only of London but of Dublin, and made valuable 
discoveries in the priceless collection of Sir Thomas Philipps. To 
master the foreign relations of the country he paid special visits 
to Paris and the Hague. The English History was constructed 
on the same plan as the French, its object being to study the 
epochs in which its influence on the development of mankind 
was most marked. ' In the last two centuries the glory of their 
arms abroad lay nearest to the heart of the French nation, the 
legal settlement of their home affairs to that of England.' He 
hints that though it would be folly to challenge Macaulay in his 
own peculiar sphere, it might be useful to have an independent 
representation of events. He approached his new task with 
unusual sympathy. France was the country of absolutism, inno- 
vation and aggression. England was orderly and conservative. 
■ Nowhere have more of the institutions of the Middle Ages been 
retained.' 

Following his usual practice, he opens with a brief sketch of 
early English history. The narrative broadens with Henry VIII, 
of whom he paints a portrait scarcely affected by Froude's 
recent volumes. ' He had no real sympathy with any living 
man. Men are to him only instruments which he uses and 
breaks to pieces. But he has an incomparable practical intelli- 
gence. We follow the course of his government with a mingled 
sense of aversion and admiration.' Once again he showed that 
he was fully alive to the place of personality in history. After 
concluding his survey of Elizabeth, he remarks that under no 
dynasty had great national changes been so dependent on the 
personal aims of princes. The kernel of the book is the founda- 
tion of Parliamentary Monarchy and the two revolutions of the 
seventeenth century. He refused to accept the partial defence 
of James I then being commenced by Gardiner, and rates 
Charles I, both as man and ruler, above his father. Realising 
that Anglicanism was not Catholicism, he commends the sincerity 

was never there till the present year ; but he repeatedly cites the splendid 
Simancas collection in the Archives of State, of which he never saw a dozen 
volumes. His citations are mere crumbs stuck together in a chance fashion 
to produce the appearance of being the results of systematic study.' — 
Ward's article on Gindely, Eng. Hist. Review, July, 1893. 



94 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, and depth of his religious convictions. ' There was something 
V* of the martyr in him, if the man can be so called who values his 
1/ own life less than the cause for which he is fighting and, in perish- 
ing himself, saves it for the future.' His capital fault was his 
inability to understand the ideas of other minds. His attempt 
to rule without Parliament rendered failure inevitable, and the 
future of Great Britain was involved in victory over Stuart 
principles. Pym appears not as a defender of law and tradition 
but as one of the greatest of revolutionary leaders. The picture 
of Cromwell is painted without much sympathy ; but he seizes 
the capital fact that the conservative elements in him were as 
numerous as the destructive. He was also the first to establish 
with a wealth of new material the European character of the 
Revolution of 1688. With the death of William III the path 
narrows, and ends with the accession of George III. The main 
value of the work lies in the new light thrown on the relations 
of England to the Continent, and the reaction of those relations 
on her internal life. 1 Of scarcely less importance was the 
presentation of the domestic struggle from the point of view of a 
foreigner far better equipped than Guizot. If it has less life and 
colour than some of its predecessors, it possesses a weight and 
dignity that he never surpassed. The analyses of Clarendon and 
Burnet are of first-rate importance. Without ever becoming 
widely popular, its place as an historical classic is secure. 



Ill 

The English History completed the cycle of works embracing 
the Great Powers of Europe which Ranke had planned during 
his sojourn in Italy, and the execution of which had filled forty 
laborious years. They were followed by a number of writings 
which belong rather to the class of historical monographs. His 
' Contributions to German History, 1555-1618/ took up the story 
at the point where the ' Reformation ' had dropped it. The study 
of Ferdinand I and Maximilian II had appeared in the Review ; 
but the portrait of Rudolf II was new, and there is no more 
interesting canvas in the historian's gallery than this mysterious 
ruler, with his stricken brain and his love of the occult world. 
A more important venture was the ' History of Wallenstein.' 
Ranke had often touched the Thirty Years War ; but his new 
work was based on fresh research at Brussels, Dresden and 

1 Even Bergenroth, who violently attacked the first volume in the 
Grenzboten, admitted the excellence of this feature. 



RANKE 95 

Vienna. The great soldier was of peculiar interest, since tradition CHAP, 
and scholarship alike were uncertain whether to regard him as a VI 
traitor or a man of honour. Hurter, the historiographer of the 
Hapsburgs, naturally condemned him. Ranke's Wallenstein is 
greedy to obtain territory and to found a dynasty ; but though 
he toyed with treason, the final act of treachery was not com- 
mitted. While every one trusted Gustavus Adolphus, no man had 
confidence in his rival. A gigantic egoist and a grandiose 
figure, he was only an adventurer. The subsequent discovery of 
his relations with Sweden renders the later chapters antiquated ; 
and for once Ranke accepted documents — the reports of Sezyma 
Raschin— which have proved to be forgeries. But the book 
retains its interest, and a corrected edition has recently 
been issued by Hallwich, the greatest of living Wallenstein 
scholars. 

The works of the seventies reflect the mood of 1870. Ranke 
welcomed the result of the war as a triumph of conservative over 
revolutionary Europe ; but he was wholly free from national 
rancour. ' Who of us all,' he asked, ' is uninfluenced by the 
French spirit ? ' Meeting his old friend Thiers at Vienna, he 
gently remarked : ' We are fighting against Louis XIV.' He had 
already begun a study on the Origin of the Seven Years' War, 
and in the summer and autumn of 1870 he completed it. The 
preface described it as his tribute to the events of the day ; 
but the work was no less objective than its predecessors. On the 
capital question, still undecided, as to the responsibility for the 
war he declares that Frederick desired peace at that particular 
moment, but that he always intended further acquisitions in order 
to safeguard what he had. If the ' Seven Years' War ' was in the 
nature of an appendix to the ' Prussia,' which had stopped in 
1748, a larger work was in part devoted to a still later chapter of 
Frederick's reign. ' The German Powers and the Furstenbund, 
1780-90,' rested on a mass of material drawn from German, 
Austrian and Dutch archives. The portrait of Joseph, the hero 
of the book, is painted with genuine sympathy. That of Frederick 
William II emphasises, perhaps a little too generously, the better 
side of a ruler who has few friends. Having thus dealt with 
Prussia in the later part of the eighteenth century he returned 
to the origins of the State. In 1867 he had begun to publish a 
complete edition of his works, revising and sometimes adding to 
them. In no case was the alteration so great as in the ' History 
of Prussia,' the first Book of which was transformed into four. 
The appearance of Droysen's colossal work had rendered the 
chapters on early Prussia obsolete ; but the new Books, while 



g6 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, freely employing his material, quietly rejected the national 
VI role which his colleague assigned to the Hohenzollerns. 

The next work returned to the beginnings of contemporary 
history. ' The Origin of the Wars of the Revolution,' though one 
of his least important works, is interesting for the author's 
view of the French Revolution. He underestimates the auto- 
cracy of the last two monarchs and their colossal mistakes ; and 
the responsibility for the outbreak is attributed almost entirely 
to the opposition of the clergy and noblesse to reform. His 
hostility to the ideas of the Revolution is undiminished ; but the 
judicial habit never forsakes him. By their foolish interference 
the Powers excited the national pride of France. The conflict 
was rendered inevitable by the sharp contradiction of two hostile 
worlds, the clash of the revolutionary with the conservative 
idea. In maintaining his ground Sybel declared that Ranke 
only knew part of the material, and added, ' I do not see ideas 
outside men, which lead them like demonic forces against their 
will. I see rather men form their intellectual system and act in 
accordance with it.' While Sybel, the National Liberal, held 
it to be reasonable for the sovereigns to dictate to France, his 
conservative master does justice to the French point of view. 
At the age of eighty-two the veteran issued a large work on 
Hardenberg, which roughly serves as a continuation of the 
'Fiirstenbund ' and the ' Wars of the Revolution.' Hardenberg had 
ordered that his papers should not be touched for half a century 
after his death ; and when the time arrived the seals were 
broken by Bismarck himself and the documents were entrusted 
to the Nestor of German historians. The ' Memoires d'un homme 
d'etat,' published in 1827, only included a few genuine pieces 
and were almost worthless. The authentic papers by no means 
covered the whole of the great minister's life ; but they con- 
tained a highly important Memorandum on Prussian policy 
in 1806-7, anc * other pieces of considerable value. Using the 
manuscripts of Haugwitz and other contemporaries, Ranke 
built up a history of Prussian policy during the Great War around 
the personality of Hardenberg. The work opens with a brief 
sketch of his career before entering the Prussian service at the 
age of forty ; but this is the only piece of genuine biography in 
the whole work. He justifies the Treaty of Basel as not only 
politically wise but as ushering in eleven years of neutrality 
' which were almost the most fruitful in German literature.' 
But unlike Sybel he is never unfair to Austria, and recognises 
that in 1809 she stood for the freedom of Europe. The chapter 
on Jena is written without emotion. The work ends in 1813, the 



RANKE 97 

later years of the statesman's life finding no elucidation in his CHAP, 
papers. Treitschke has pronounced the ' Hardenberg ' far in- v ^ 
ferior to Ranke's earlier works in artistic beauty and historical 
judgment ; but it is none the less a solid contribution to the 
history of the Napoleonic era and reveals the historian's tran- 
quillity when dealing with the crisis of his country's fate. A 
minor editorial duty was the publication of the correspondence 
of Frederick William IV with Bunsen ; and the historian 
gladly undertook the task of elucidating and defending the 
policy of his beloved master. The personal devotion com- 
manded respect ; but the portrait was generally judged too 
nattering, and it was in reference to this volume that Treitschke 
harshly pronounced Ranke too much of a courtier to tell the 
whole truth about great people. Other aspects of the reign 
were dealt with in the biography contributed to the German 
Biographical Dictionary in 1878. 1 The mass of work that had 
followed the English History was immense. There was not a 
chapter without value ; yet he seemed to have lost the power 
of appealing to the interest of the general reader. The bright 
colours and realistic portraits had disappeared. Only an occa- 
sional and perfunctory chapter on literature recalls the breadth 
and fullness of the earlier works. The charge that he neglected 
personality at last began to have some substance. 

In the spring of 1880 Ranke informed his publisher of a new 
work on Universal History, the first two volumes of which 
appeared at the end of the same year. The world was astounded 
at the audacity of a man of eighty-five sitting down to such a 
task. Would he live to finish it ? Would his brain bear the 
prolonged strain of composition ? The historian himself knew 
the risks, but his resolution had been taken after long and 
serious thought. For several years he had been wholly unable 
to read and write, and had to work through two secretaries. 2 
Original research had become impossible. ' He told me,' records 
Giesebrecht, ' that one reason was his incapacity any longer to 
work in the archives, and it was impossible to five without work.' 
He had at first thought of writing his autobiography, weaving 
round it the movement of the century ; but he finally determined 
on a book like Humboldt's ' Kosmos ' which would be at once the 
natural conclusion of his achievement and an emphatic assertion 

'- See Kaufmann's ' Ranke u. die Beurteiltmg F. W. IV,' Hist, Zeitschrift, 
1902. 

- Vivid pictures of his methods are drawn by Wiedemann, ' Sechzehn 
Jahre in der Werkstatte Ranke's,' Deutsche Revue, 1891-3 ; and Georg 
Winter, * Erinnerungen an Ranke,' Nord u. Sud, Ang. 1888. 

H 



98 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, of the unity of history. His whole life had been a preparation 
VI for the task. ' The return to the classics/ he wrote to Reumont, 
' gives me special pleasure. I use my school-books and the little 
sketches I made in Frankfurt, so that age and youth are joined.' 
Though he had published but little on the Middle Ages, he had 
repeatedly covered the ground in his lectures, for which he 
possessed full notes. He had minutely studied many of the 
more important sources in his Seminar. He was, moreover, in 
touch with the results of mediaeval scholarship through an army 
of pupils. His mind was synthetic, and he stood above the 
rivalries of race and creed. It was impossible, he declared, to 
rest in the history of single peoples. The race had won in the 
course of ages an heirloom in material and social advance, 
religion and the creations of genius, memories of great events 
and great men which unified mankind. There was a general 
historical life, which moved progressively from one nation or 
group of nations to another. Starting from this conception of 
a single process he excludes the origins of society as unknown 
and the peoples of the East as standing aloof from the main 
stream. 

A brief survey of Egypt and the civilisations of Hither Asia 
leads to the Greece of the Persian wars with which the detailed 
narrative opens. He closely follows Herodotus and Thucydides. 
He is fair both to Demosthenes and Philip, and is strongly 
attracted by the typically universal figure of Alexander. ' With 
all our sympathy for the freedom of Greece we are tempted to 
find some compensation for its destruction in the fuller influence 
of the Greek genius on the world.' The volume ends with the 
Diadochi and a glance at Sicily and Carthage. With Pyrrhus 
we reach Rome, whose early history is only sketched in outline. 
While employing Mommsen throughout, he retains his independ- 
ent judgment, shunning exaggeration and invective. He respects 
Pompey without claiming greatness for him, and denies that 
Cicero was the Varnhagen of antiquity. His task is to winnow 
the important from the trivial, to mark the position of Rome in 
the chain of universal history. The first two volumes of the 
' Weltgeschichte,' though the edition was exhausted in a week, 
form by far its least important part, and are the least authorita- 
tive of Ranke's writings. The vast collections of Greek and 
Roman inscriptions and the testimony of archaeology, to name 
only two new sources, were wholly unknown to him. Nor had 
he assimilated the results of critical study in regard to origins, 
whether of early Israel or of early Greece. The judgment of 
Eduard Meyer is scarcely too severe. ' He lacked real prepara- 






RANKE 



99 



tion for his task. He had only occupied himself with antiquity CHAP, 
in his youth, yet felt himself justified in virtually ignoring the VI 
scientific work of half a century. Under such circumstances the 
attempt could only issue in total failure.' l 

In the third volume, devoted to the Roman Empire, the 
chapter that attracted most attention was on the origin of 
Christianity. ' In pronouncing the name of Jesus Christ,' he 
wrote, ' though I am a good evangelical Christian, I must decline 
to discuss the religious secret which, being incomprehensible, 
is beyond the grasp of history. Of God the Son I can speak 
as little as of God the Father. The historian can only show 
the combination of world -historic influences in which Christianity 
appeared and by which its operation was conditioned.' Whereas 
Judaism could never become universal, the message of Christ 
provided the foundation on which the conception of a higher 
community could arise. His interest in the Christian Church is 
further revealed in the fourth volume, which deals at length 
with Athanasius and Arius, Julian and Neoplatonism. With 
the V olkerw cinder ung he reached a period on which he could 
speak with greater authority. The sixth volume, extending to 
the death of Otto I, was the last that he saw in print. While 
engaged on this he made use above all of Giesebrecht. ' The 
beginnings of our historical association,' he wrote to the author 
of the Kaiserzeit, ' floated before me. I often feel as if I was in 
the midst of these friends. I thank you and my other pupils for 
your writings on the ninth and tenth centuries.' He had reached 
his ninetieth birthday at the end of 1885 in perfect possession of 
his powers, like an aged ruler gazing out over his kingdom. 2 He 
hurried forward with feverish haste, despite almost continual 
sufferings. ' Inter tor menta scripsi,' he wrote to a friend. When he 
died in May 1886 he had reached the death of Henry IV. The 
seventh volume was dictated in four months. His gigantic plan 
was almost accomplished, for he had determined to give merely 
a sketch of modern history. As a substitute for the unwritten 
volumes on the later Middle Ages Dove published the manu- 
script of his lectures, completed by notes of his hearers, bringing 
the story to 1453. 

The ' Weltgeschichte ' was a wonderful production, considered 
merely as the intellectual achievement of a man between eighty 
and ninety who could no longer either read or write. No 
survey of world history has ever been attempted by one 
whose knowledge approached that of Ranke. He moves with 

1 Geschichte des Altertums, vol. i., pt. 1, 250, 1910. 

2 Acton. 



ioo HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, consummate ease through vast tracts of human experience. 
VI Making no attempt to rival the meritorious compendium of Weber, 
his work is written for and best appreciated by those who already 
know a good deal. Though the book deals above all with great 
tendencies, the importance of the individual actor is more fully 
recognised than in the other works of his old age. ' On the 
summit of deep, universal, tumultuous movements,' ran his last 
dictated words, ' appear natures cast in a gigantic mould which 
rivet the attention of the centuries. General tendencies do not 
alone decide ; great personalities are always necessary to make 
them effective.' In speaking of Alexander he remarks that the 
spectator can hardly tear himself away from the Paris bust 
when he thinks of the deeds and qualities of the man it represents. 
His portraits of Alexander and Demosthenes, David and Con- 
stantine, Charles the Great and Otto I, Nicholas I and Hilde- 
brand, live and move. 

The only attack came from the Catholic camp. The Jesuit 
Michael l hotly denounced his treatment of the Roman Church, 
and pronounced his attitude to Christianity the fundamental 
error of the book. Ranke, he declared, was a rationalist without 
wishing to show it. He failed to understand the Church and the 
Papacy, and praised Julian and Mohammed. There can be few 
readers of the ' Weltgeschichte ' who would accept the verdict that 
it is anti-Catholic and anti-Christian. The work breathes a deeply 
religious spirit, and the author's intense interest in religious life 
and thought is manifested in the prominence he devotes to 
ecclesiastical history. But his faith was not of a kind that 
supplied him with an easy key to the problems of history. In the 
lectures to King Maximilian 3 he declared it impossible to prove 
a directing will leading mankind from point to point or an im- 
manent force driving him towards a goal. All generations were 
equally justified before God and stood in equally direct relation 
to Him. Moral ideas could expand only in area, not in quality. 
Beyond Christianity it was impossible to go. Humanity con- 
tained within itself endless developments appearing in obedience 
to unknown laws. History was the record of divine manifesta- 
tions imperfectly understood. Lamprecht's criticism, 3 in some 
ways so perverse, rightly emphasises the essentially mystical 
character of his outlook. 

Ranke's faults were negative rather than positive. His 

1 Michael, Ranke's Weltgeschichte, 1890. 

2 tJbev die Epochen der neueren Geschichte, published in 1888 with an 
excellent introduction by Dove. 

3 A Ue u. neue Richtungen in der Geschichtswissenschaft, 1896. 



RANKE 1 01 

contemporaries complained less of what they found than of what CHAP, 
they missed. The ardent nationalist lamented his cosmopolitan VI 
tranquillity, the moralist his ethical neutrality, the materialist 
his cloudy transcendentalism. Treitschke wrote scathingly of 
the soft sunlight, scarcely veiled by occasional clouds, which 
illumined an elegant circle of high-born and refined men. On 
reading the Prussian History Strauss sighed for the brush of 
Rembrandt. Menzel complained bitterly of his glace gloves. 
Acton pronounces that the world was much better and very 
much worse than he chose to say. On his ninetieth birthday 
Mommsen, with an undercurrent of protest, remarked, ' You are 
the most indulgent of us all.' The verdict of Gregorovius was 
that he went through history as he would go through a picture- 
gallery, writing acute notes. Sybel regretted that while ... 
Niebuhr's innermost feeling was ethical, Ranke's was aesthetic, 
and that he surveyed the past with the eyes not of a statesman 
but an artist. Reuss constrasts him with Michelet and Momm- 
sen, where we feel the passion rise in the soul of the narrator and 
quicken his style. Such judgments indicate that the critic belongs 
to a rival school ; yet the most loyal disciples now admit that 
there were spots on the sun. His harmonious nature made him 
to some extent blind to great tides of emotion and great outbursts^ 
of passion, to the sublimities and degradations of life. It was 
well that he did not carry out his plan of a history of the French 
Revolution. In dealing with individuals and nations alike he 
was most at home in the middle regions of human experience. 
In another direction his work was also incomplete. When the 
history of States has been written and the development of the 
European system has been made clear, the life of the people 
and the ideas that govern and explain action have still to be 
described. There is a tendency to survey events too much from 
the windows of the council-chamber, to neglect the masses, to over- 
look the pressure of economic forces. The Venetian Relations, 
which helped to make his fortune and to which he attributed a 
somewhat excessive value, exerted a permanent influence on his 
mind. It is, above all, in the greater attention to the evolution 
of society and to the witnesses of noiseless change that a later 
generation has advanced beyond his theory and practice. 

His services to history can be rapidly summarised. The ■ s yS 
first was to divorce the study of the past from the passions of the_ 
present, and to relate what actually occurred — wie es eigentlich 
gewesen. His attitude is nowhere more concisely defined than in 
his obituary of Gervinus. ' He often declares that science must 
establish relations with life. Very true ; but it must be real 



102 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, science. If we first choose a standpoint and transport it into 
VI "1- science, then life operates on science, not science on life.' His 
own strong opinions remain locked in his bosom. In his dramas 
there are neither heroes nor villains. The second service was to 
establish the necessity of founding historical construction on 
strictly contemporary sources. He was not the first to use the 
\^ archives, but the first to use them well. When he began to write, 
historians of high repute believed memoirs and chronicles to be 
the best authorities. When he laid down his pen, every scholar 
with a reputation to make or to lose had learned to content him- 
self with nothing less than the papers and correspondence of the 
actors themselves and those in immediate contact with the events 
. they describe. Thirdly, he founded the science of evidence by the 
analysis of authorities, contemporary or otherwise, in the light 
of the author's -temperament, affiliations and opportunity of 

— ■»' knowledge and by comparison with the testimony of other 

writers. Henceforth every historian must inquire where his 
informant obtained his facts. It is Ranke's glory to have rendered 
the history of modern Europe fully inteUigible, to have established 
its unity and portrayed the leading actors in the drama. He 
was congratulated by Arneth on having given a masterpiece 
to every country. v-He was beyond comparison the greatest 
historical writer of modern times, not only because he founded the 
scientific study of materials and possessed in an unrivalled 
degree the judicial temper, but because his powers of work and 
length of life enabled him to produce a larger number of first-rate 
V/' works than any other writer. It was he who made German 
scholarship supreme in Europe ; and no one has ever approxi- 
mated so closely to the ideal historian. 






CHAPTER VII 



RANKES CRITICS AND PUPILS 



Ranke lived long enough to be recognised as beyond comparison CHAP, 
the greatest historian of his time and to see his pupils in occupa- VII 
tion of almost every chair in Germany. But the position of 
uncontested supremacy which he won for himself and his school 
was only achieved after a prolonged struggle with captious 
critics and rival traditions. The first attack, and the only one to 
which he ever paid the compliment of a reply, came from Leo. 1 
Like many other young men he had had his thoughts turned to 
history by the fiery nationalism of Vater Jahn ; and among the 
hot-headed youths who denounced the enemies of liberty on the 
Wartburg in 1817 few seemed less likely to become a pillar of 
the reaction. But with the murder of Kotzebue a drift towards 
conservatism set in, which was strengthened by the influence of 
Haller and Hegel. A visit to Italy bore fruit in a work on the 
Constitution of the Lombard Towns. No historian seemed more 
likely to win for himself a high place in scholarship, and no one 
was so well qualified by previous study to criticise the work of the 
young Frankfurt teacher. The Introduction to his translation 
of Machiavelli's letters, published in 1826, sharply attacked 
Ranke's treatment of the great Florentine. In this particular 
controversy the critic has the balance of authority on his side; 
but two years later he launched an unmeasured attack on his 
rival. The work, he declared, reminded him of an unrevised 
letter. The style was a pale copy of Johannes Miiller, the 
philosophy was superstition, the judgments unhistorical. Ranke 
was deeply hurt by this virulent onslaught, which he characterised 
as the outburst of an angry schoolmaster confronted by a new 
method. A violent retort from Leo ended the controversy, and 

1 See Kragelin, H. Leo, 1908. His memoirs, Aus meiner Jugendzeit, 
1S80, only reach to the age of 23. 



104 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

in the same year he left Berlin for Halle. Ranke wrote bitterly 
of his waspish antagonist as a crazy chatterbox ; but the paths 
of the two men were not to meet again. Leo continued to 
censure his ' timid avoidance of personal views ' as unmanly, and 
contemptuously dismissed his writings as porcelain painting, the 
delight of ladies and amateurs. 

His authority soon began to wane, and by his own failings. 
' With other men,' wrote Acton, ' the question is how they came 
to succeed, with Leo how such abilities contrived to miss the first 
rank.' His ' History of the Italian States,' contributed to the series 
of Heeren and Ukert, marks the first advance beyond Sismondi ; 
but the fifth volume, sketching the decline and fall, exhibits 
signs of the prejudices which were to ruin his later works. The 
Reformation, he affirmed, was the beginning of a process of 
degeneration which was still in progress. His colossal prejudices 
and ungovernable temper found outlet in a series of large and 
hastily written works on the Netherlands, the Jews, and the 
history of the world. Though nominally a Protestant he glorified 
the Roman Church and its champions. ' Since Constantine the 
history of the Christian Church forms the kernel, the soul, the 
life of universal history.' He glories in Hildebrand and Canossa, 
approves the Inquisition and the Albigensian crusade, condemns 
Wycliffe and Hus, denounces Luther as the enemy of authority, 
and justifies Alva's reign of blood. His hatreds extend beyond 
religion to race. The French are denounced as a nation of 
monkeys, and the Celts as a prey to bestial instincts. These 
extravagances would be unworthy of mention but for the remark- 
able personality behind them. Leo was a man of wide learning 
and passionate sincerity, and his lectures formed an epoch in many 
lives. Rudolf Delbriick keenly enjoyed them, but came to prefer 
the tranquil objectivity of Ranke, which seemed to him like a 
clear 'sky after the storm clouds. Long before his death in 1878 
he was an extinct volcano. 

A far more serious obstacle to the acceptance of Ranke 's 
methods and the recognition of his authority was the didactic 
school, of which the chief figures were Rotteck, Schlosser and 
Gervinus. Though now only a name, Rotteck 1 was for more than 
a generation the chief historical and political instructor of South 
Germany. A native of Baden and the son of a French mother, 
he early assimilated French ideas and adopted Rousseau as his 
master. Appointed Professor at Freiburg in 1798, he used his 

1 See Ropell's Rotteck, 1883, and Ganter, Rotteck als Geschichtschreiber, 
1908, The fourth volume of his Gesammelte u. nachgelassene Schriften, 
1841-3, contains a life by his son, the fifth his correspondence. 



RANKE'S CRITICS AND PUPILS 105 

chair as a tribune and a pulpit. ' I revere history,' he declared, CHAP. 
' as a wise counsellor and judge.' His lectures formed the basis VII 
of his Universal History, which began to appear in 1812. He 
made no pretence of adding to the sum of knowledge. In the 
frank words of the preface, it was published as a work of 
propaganda. Its aim was not only to enrich the mind but to 
strengthen the will and train the character of youth. ' My 
noble young friends, I desire to show you the great teachings, 
the elevated pictures of the past, to awake love and admiration 
for the splendid characters of old, to kindle a passion for righteous- 
ness, freedom and fatherland.' His attack on Alexander, his 
invective against Rome for suppressing the freedom of the world, 
his onslaughts on every sort of despotism were aimed — and were 
well understood to be aimed — at the omnipotent ruler on the 
Seine. In the preface to the second edition, written in 1821, he 
reminded his readers that the first volume was published before 
the retreat from Moscow revived the hope of liberty. ' History 
was then the only organ by which wisdom could be taught.' 
After Waterloo the work was not less needed to encourage the 
fight for constitutional liberty. Though placed on the Index 
and forbidden in Austria, it was allowed to circulate freely 
throughout Germany, and translations into English and French, 
Italian, Danish and Polish made it in some degree the bible of 
Liberal Europe. The author witnessed the appearance of the 
thirteenth edition before his death in 1840. A twenty-fifth 
edition appeared in 1866, while an abridgment enjoyed a 
popularity scarcely less than that of the larger work. Lacking 
both learning and style, the affection which it inspired is to be 
explained by the fact that an age hungry for liberty found in it 
encouragement to persevere in the demand. 

More of a moralist and less of a politician than Rotteck, 
Schlosser 1 was the most influential writer and teacher of history 
in Germany during the years in which Ranke was climbing the 
summits of fame. In a short autobiography he records the dis- 
appointments of his student life at Gottingen. ' I was soon healed 
from the error of the German Professors that they were the lights 
of the world.' For a time he shared the prevailing cult of Johannes 
Muller, naming him the German Thucydides ; but he quickly 
outgrew his admiration. He served no master, his censorious 
spirit invariably finding more to blame than to praise. He 

1 Weber's F. C. Schlosser, 1876, contains an autobiography, a biography, 
letters and fragments. Gervinus' striking tribute is in Gervinus' Leben von 
ihm selbst, 150-215, 1893. The best appreciation is by Lorenz, Die 

Geschichtswissenschaft, 1-89, 1886. 



io6 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, roamed at large over the field of history, and after reaching the 
VI1 age of thirty produced monographs on Abelard and Beza. In 
the preface to the latter he strikes a didactic note which was 
to sound throughout his life. His object, he declared, was to 
wean his contemporaries from evil tendencies by the teachings 
of history. A year or two later he published a substantial 
volume on the Iconoclasts, one of the first adventures of a modern 
historian into the unknown Byzantine world. In 1811 he began 
to write his ' Weltgeschichte,' the first of the two large works to 
which he owed his immense fame. His intention was to cover 
the whole field of history in three small volumes. The first, 
extending to the fall of the Western Empire, rested on the 
conscientious study of the original authorities. A second 
edition, largely expanded, appeared under the title of ' A View 
of the History and Culture of the Ancient World.' As Rotteck 
was a mere compiler, it was largely through Schlosser that 
classical antiquity swam into the ken of the cultured middle 
classes of Germany. The final title of the work was ' Universal 
History for the German People,' edited by a pupil in nineteen 
volumes from the master's works, for which he contributed a 
survey of the modern centuries. 

Parallel with the ' Weltgeschichte,' Schlosser was engaged for 
several decades on a work of much greater importance. A visit 
to the libraries of Paris in 1822 was followed by two little volumes 
on the eighteenth century, which in turn were expanded after 
a second visit in 1834. The eighth and last volume only appeared 
in i860, the year of his death. The most valuable and interesting 
pages are those which are devoted to the intellectual life of 
France, Germany and England. He warmly admires such bold 
spirits as Reimarus and the Deists, Thomasius and Lessing, 
Campomanes and Febronius. The political survey, extending 
from the war of the Spanish Succession to the fall of Napoleon, 
is of inferior merit and embodies little original material. He 
commends the aims if not the methods of the Philosophic Despots ; 
but his attitude towards princes is one of almost monotonous 
depreciation. He speaks with loathing of the coarse brutalities 
of the petty German Courts, Versailles and St. Petersburg, and of 
the marketing of Hessian soldiers. He condemns the harsh 
selfishness of the British aristocracy, and recalls the starving 
Irish, the children in the factories, the poor rotting in the work- 
houses. His ambition was to tear off the mask with which lies, 
ambition and greed had tried to cover the misdeeds of the mighty. 
His contempt for the servile swarm of flatterers is not less than 
for courts and titles. Gentz is denounced as a sophist who lies 



RANKE'S CRITICS AND PUPILS 107 

in order to revel at the tables of the great. Yet Schlosser was CHAP, 
no flatterer of the people. He had little belief in the power VI1 
of constitutions to improve the world, and had no political 
system to advocate. He denounces the excesses of the Revolu- 
tion, as he had chastised the feuds of Athens and Rome. He 
refused to join in the glorification of the Wars of Liberation, 
and, without defending Napoleon, placed some of his actions in a 
more favourable light. Though respecting real piety in all its 
forms, in Sailer as in Spener, he regarded priests as accomplices 
in tyranny with princes. Himself belonging to no Church he 
condemned clericalism and obscurantism wherever he found it. 
He scourges the Jesuits in the days of their prosperity, but 
condemns their ruthless expulsion. He was often caUed the 
modern Cato, and there was much of the early Roman in him. 
His favourite author was Dante, and his works reflect the sombre 
atmosphere of the Inferno. He was a cosmopolitan of the 
eighteenth century, a child of the Aufkldrung who had learned 
the categorical imperative from Kant. His convictions found 
striking expression in a rhapsody on the death of his old friend 
Voss. ' Where Lessing and Luther are mentioned there will 
his name too be called. A champion of freedom of belief and 
teaching, he fought an heroic fight. O God ! let us stand firm till 
death in the truth we have found.' 

The gospel of Schlosser was proclaimed not only in his writings 
but in his lectures at Heidelberg, where he succeeded Wilken 
in 1817. All witnesses agree in their description of the size and 
enthusiasm of his audiences. His greatest pupil, Gervinus, has 
left a striking picture. 'At last I found what I had so long 
sought in vain. He spoke to heart and head with equal power. 
His lectures were filled with magnificent apergus before which 
the gates of history sprang open.' But such an original 
personality was rather an inspiration than a guide. He con- 
vinced his hearers of the lofty mission of history without teaching 
them how to become historians. He denied the possibility of 
objective history, maintaining that no man could ever obtain 
perfect knowledge of the inner connection of events. But he 
cannot be said to have made very strenuous efforts to obtain such 
information as was available. He despised the abstruse research 
of Ranke and spoke with contempt of the dust of archives. 
Like Leo he outlived his fame and his influence. In the preface 
to the concluding volume of the ' Eighteenth Century,' written a 
few months before his death, he confessed himself no longer 
strong enough for the task of warning and improving his genera- 
tion. There was something pathetic in the consistency with 



108 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

which he clung to the doctrines of his early manhood, while 
historical studies were advancing by the light of other stars. 
' Schlosser lamented to me,' wrote Strauss in 1858, 1 ' that the 
younger historians, including Gervinus, lay so little stress on 
morality in history, though Gervinus is a highly moral man.' 
His lecture-room emptied and his ideals were ignored. His 
greatest, indeed his only disciple, in the eloquent apologia written 
on his master's death, recognised the change. Opinions on 
Schlosser, he wrote, were no longer unanimous. He was accused 
of formlessness, self-righteousness, censoriousness. The first 
charge was true ; but the graver counts in the indictment rested 
on a misapprehension of the historian's aims. The object of 
his books was less to convey instruction than to teach men to 
live. ' I have a feeling,' he concludes, ' that if a man had done 
nothing more than be to another what he was to me, that alone 
would be enough to give his life the highest value.' Schlosser 
himself would have been more gratified by this personal con- 
fession than by any tribute to his erudition. He was indeed 
rather a moralist and a prophet than an historian. Yet this 
man of imperfect research and narrow philosophy was one of the 
main intellectual and moral forces of Germany for nearly half 
a century, and was long held to be the rival, if not indeed the 
superior, of Ranke. 

The name of GervinUs 2 is inseparably connected with that of 
Schlosser. Both were men of ample learning and rare intellectual 
vigour, both sought in history above all a guide to life. But 
though the disciple was not less austere, he was more a politician 
than a moralist. While Schlosser called the age to repentance, 
Gervinus summoned it to action. The master's appeal was to the 
individual conscience ; the pupil spoke to the nation. In his 
Autobiography he records his omnivorous reading at school of 
history and literature and his composition of poetry and dramas. 
His mature intellectual life began in 1825 when he entered Heidel- 
berg and attended the lectures of Schlosser. A year in Italy was 
chiefly devoted to Florentine history, above all to Machiavelli. 
Of his ' Florentine Historiography ' more than half was devoted to 
the author of the ' Prince.' A true patriot in a vicious age, he 
dared all for the good of his country. Far from representing 

1 Brief e, 397- 

2 See Gervinus' Leben von ihm selbst, 1893 ; Ranke's Abh. u. Versuche, 
Neue Sammlung, 567-76, 1888; Dollinger, Akademische Vortrdge, vol. ii., 
1889 ; Zeller, Vortrdge u. Abhandlungen, vol. ii. ; Dorfel, Gervinus als 
historischer Denker, 1904. His correspondence with the Grimms and 
Dahlmann fills the second volume of Briefwechsel zwischen J. u. W. Grimm, 
Dahlmann u. Gervinus, 1886. 



RANKE'S CRITICS AND PUPILS 



109 



his time at its lowest, he could well afford to despise his contem- CHAP, 
poraries. He was, moreover, the father of the scientific handling VII 
of history. ' As I sought rather enlightenment than the accumu- 
lation of material,' he wrote long after in his Autobiography, ' I 
could not have fallen in with anybody more suitable. Machia- 
velli combines history and politics.' The little book showed 
both independence and ability, and won golden opinions from 
Schlosser and Dahlmann. The Revolution of 1830 strengthened 
his interest in politics. ' The annihilation of fifteen years of re- 
action in a few July days awoke the belief that the day of political 
development for Germany too was dawning ; but I felt that she 
must avoid hasty and premature change.' His cautious attitude 
was expressed in a vigorous attack on Borne's pretensions to be 
a political Luther and a warm eulogy of Dahlmann 's ' Politik.' 
Each essay as it came from his pen was a call to action. 

In 1837 he was to show that his interest in public affairs 
was not merely academic. He had been appointed to a chair 
at Gottingen a few months before the separation of the English 
and Hanoverian crowns brought to the throne Ernest Augustus, 
whose first act was to tear up the constitution. Nowhere was 
the indignation more intense than in the University which formed 
the glory of the Kingdom. Seven of the leading Professors, among 
them Gervinus and Dahlmann, Ewald and the Grimms, united in 
a resounding protest, and were immediately deprived of their 
posts. The action of ' the Gottingen Seven ' is a landmark in 
German history, signalising at once the growing strength of con- 
stitutional principles and the emergence of the Professors as an 
active influence in politics. The courageous declaration made 
the name of Gervinus for the first time familiar throughout 
Germany, and the plaudits encouraged him in his resolve to 
awaken his countrymen to political self-consciousness. ' The 
active life,' he declared in his ' Historik,' written at this moment, 
' is the middle point of all history. All the forces of mankind 
concentrate on action.' 

Among the methods he employed was the composition of a 
history of German poetry. ' The age which seemed to me called 
to undertake a reconstruction of civic life continued to write 
poetry. I soon became convinced that the epoch of real greatness 
in German poetry was past.' Literature, moreover, was mere 
dilettantism while great and serious work was waiting to be done. 
A nation must concentrate its powers. ' You must decide,' he 
wrote in the dedication of the fourth volume to Dahlmann, 
' whether I have succeeded in a subject which is as a rule dis- 
cussed aesthetically. Our belles-lettres have become a stagnant 



no HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, bog, filled with such poisonous substances that men are sighing 
VII for a storm from without. If the life of Germany is not to stand 
still, we must entice the talents which have now no goal to the 
practical work of the State.' The book was a pantheon in 
which there was no more room ; for the last of the immortals 
was Goethe. Though the motive was narrowly practical, the 
' History of German Poetry ' possesses a high value of its own. 
Rejecting the aesthetic criticism that had been dominant, he 
endeavoured to seize the connection of writings and their 
authors with their time. It was this attempt to place literature 
in its historical setting that renders the work a landmark. It 
was, moreover, in its earlier portions, almost wholly new. For 
the first time Germany possessed a detailed narrative of her 
literary growth. Jacob Grimm hailed it with enthusiasm, 
expressing special admiration for its patriotic spirit. 

On the completion of the ' History of German Poetry,' Gervinus 
was called to Heidelberg, where his lectures drew large audiences. 
His aim, as ever, was to fire his hearers with worthy political 
ambitions. In 1847 he founded the Deutsche Zeitung, with the 
aid of Dahlmann, Droysen, Hausser and other Professors, to 
demand constitutional government and to work for German unity. 
The refusal of the Imperial crown by Frederick William IV 
transformed him into the bitter critic of Prussia that he remained 
throughout life. He now devoted himself to the chief historical 
undertaking of his life ; but before approaching his main task, 
he wrote a volume of prolegomena. The ' Introduction to the 
History of the Nineteenth Century ' may be read by itself without 
regard to the bulky work of which it forms the vestibule. 1 For 
the last three or four centuries, he declared, history has been 
moving in a single direction, in spite of hindrances and curves, 
from the freedom of the individual to that of the mass. Modern 
history is the struggle of the democratic ideas thrown off by the 
Reformation with the aristocratic structures of the Middle Ages 
and the absolutism of the crown. Since Napoleon individuals 
have been of little importance, and the movements of the time 
are carried on by the instinct of the masses. Will the Fourth 
Estate now triumph ? Germany already possesses intellectual 
and religious freedom, and awaits political emancipation. 

This eloquent tribute to the strength of democracy was fol- 
lowed by a prosecution for treason in Baden. The author was 
condemned to imprisonment and his book to destruction ; and 
though the sentence was reversed, it revealed the dangers of 
democratic propaganda. The first volume of the History 
1 It was translated into English in 1853. 



RANKE'S CRITICS AND PUPILS in 

appeared in 1855 with a striking dedication to Schlosser. ' It CHAP. 
will follow up your work on the eighteenth century ; and if you VII 
find it in part worthy to be considered a continuation my 
ambition will be more than satisfied. I have learned such a deep- 
rooted reverence for the majesty and greatness of history from 
you that it alone would make me free from passion, favour or 
fear. I hope I may exhibit something of that splendid sanity 
with which your writings are penetrated.' There is a good deal 
of Schlosser in the book ; but the tone is on the whole more 
tranquil. Part of the work, above all the volumes relating to 
the revolutions in South America and the Greek war of inde- 
pendence, contained a full narrative of little-known events. In 
dealing with Central Europe he claimed that the history of the 
Congresses was related for the first time from authentic docu- 
ments. But the most interesting sections to the student of to-day 
are the surveys of literature and intellectual movements. His 
strength lay in his width of vision, in his interpretation of the 
ideas fermenting beneath the crust of things. His book was 
described by Treitschke, an unfriendly witness, as one of the most 
thoughtful histories in existence. He is everywhere on the side of 
the opposition — in Greece, Italy and Spain, in America, in Central 
Europe. Metternich is the evil genius of the time, his statesman- 
ship an utter failure. Gentz, his tool, was bought by Austria, 
and prostituted his great powers to the cause of absolutism. 
Frederick William III only escapes equal condemnation because 
his despotism was feeble and ineffective. The brightest spot 
of Central Europe was South Germany. The chief benefactors 
of their age were not rulers but writers. Schlosser 's writings 
were a breath of fresh air in a stuffy chamber, and Dahlmann 
proclaimed the connection of life and science. 

Gervinus keenly sympathised with the democratic movement 
of the nineteenth century ; but he was blind to the equally strong 
nationalist current that was beginning to flow. He had always 
maintained that Italy could never become a single state, and 
even when unification was in sight he demanded a federation. 
The man who had exhorted his countrymen to political activity 
witnessed the unification of Germany without enthusiasm. 
He declared that the Middle States of Germany could boast a 
far more glorious history than the two Great Powers by which 
they were overshadowed. In his eighth and closing volume, 
which ends with 1866, he explains the war of 1864 by Bismarck's 
desire to distract attention from domestic problems, and pro- 
nounces him destitute of moral ideas. The events of 1866 moved 
him to indignation, and he was only partially consoled by the 



ii2 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, victories of 1870. In the preface to the fifth edition of the 
VII ' History of German Poetry,' written after Sedan, he declares 
that Dahlmann and the Grimms, to whom he had dedicated his 
book, would not have given way to this intoxicated enthusiasm. 
In his last work, composed during the war, he wrote : ' I am a 
neutral, belonging to no party, neither aristocrat nor democrat, 
possessing no ties of interest with any state or princely house. 
I have always urged a federation, not a Prussian hegemony based 
on force.' Political freedom had at all times seemed to him a 
far greater prize than national unity and national greatness. 
In the severely truthful words of Acton, he personified the 
average middle-class German from the smaller towns of the 
smaller states. It is not surprising that to a fiery nationalist 
like Treitschke he ' hardly belonged to any nation.' 

The ' History of the Nineteenth Century ' is now almost 
forgotten. While narrating the progress of constitutional 
movements he had carried his readers with him ; but his utter 
indifference to the spirit of nationality with which Germany was 
throbbing created an estrangement. Moreover there were other 
obstacles to success. His style had never been attractive, and 
he became increasingly prolix. His inability to appreciate men 
of whose policy he disapproved gives the book a curiously one- 
sided character. The life-long enemy of doctrinaires was himself 
one of the greatest doctrinaires of the century. He had scoffed 
at Ranke's mild judgments, scornfully remarking that he tried 
to wash without getting wet ; but the censorious fashions of 
Gervinus and his master are out of date. We may, however, 
echo Ranke's gentle words on the death of his old critic : ' It 
is best that not all should attain to historical science by the same 
path.' Every school of history and politics to-day recognises 
with Jacob Grimm that he always strove for the glory of the 
living fatherland. 



II 

Unlike his friend Savigny, Ranke owed little of his influence 
to his lectures. We possess several accounts of his method, which 
closely agree in the main points. ' The first impression when 
he appeared at the table,' writes Sybel, 1 ' was one of astonishment. 
The great head framed with curly dark hair set on a little figure, 
the incessant movement that followed the play of thought with 
hasty gesture, the lecture itself, now stopping to search for the 
1 Vortrdge u. Abkandlungen, 1897. 



RANKE'S CRITICS AND PUPILS 113 

right expression, now rushing forward in headlong rapidity, CHAP, 
all this seemed strange and almost repellent. But when one VII 
grew accustomed to these habits one was carried away by the 
rich profusion of the content, the coloured and plastic grace of the 
form, while the independent research and the originality of con- 
ception appeared throughout.' ' The unusual liveliness,' records 
Giesebrecht, 1 ' was at first disconcerting. The lecture was 
thoroughly prepared. The notes lay before the teacher, but his 
words came forth as a creation of the moment and at times his 
material seemed to overwhelm him. The stream rarely flowed 
evenly. First it would issue slowly and then so rapidly that it was 
difficult to follow ; or again there would be a long pause, because 
the speaker seemed unable to find the word which conveyed 
the picture of his fancy.' ' Ranke's lectures,' testifies Hermann 
Grimm, 3 ' chained me from the first word to the last. He filled 
beginners with the feeling that they were witnessing the affairs of 
men with the experience of veteran statesmen. He spoke as if 
he had been present at all the incidents which he described.' 
Two sketches of the later years may complete the picture. ' He 
spoke without great animation,' writes Reuss, 3 who attended his 
lectures in 1862, ' and was only audible on the front benches. 
But sometimes he arrived with a more rapid step, produced some 
new book from his pocket, and discussed in animated improvisa- 
tion questions of method and criticism arising out of it. Then his 
wrinkled face lit up with a singular flame, he gesticulated like a 
young man, and those who were attentive and advanced enough 
to profit by the oracles were amply compensated for many dull 
sittings.' ' To understand his lectures,' declares Cherbuliez, 
' incredible application was needed. His voice was low and 
indistinct, at once monotonous and languishing. But the 
animation of his face and the vivacity of his gestures bore 
witness to his interest. It was with his eyes that he recounted.' 
His courses were continued till 1871, when ill-health compelled 
him to desist. 

It was not in the lecture-room that Ranke's influence as a 
teacher was most effective. The famous ' school ' by which 
historical method was revolutionised was founded in his own 
study. His Seminar was commenced in 1833, and was attended 
by a group of students, every one of whom was to win fame in the 
boundless fields of research. ' We, his most intimate disciples,' 
wrote Giesebrecht after the master's death, ' whom he collected 

1 Rede, 1887. 

2 Beitrdge z. deutschen Culturgeschichte, 38, 1897. 

3 Revue Historique, vol. xxxi. 



H4 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, round him in his home, found opportunity to gaze at close range 
VII into the workshop of this untiringly creative mind. Our admira- 
tion was aroused by his wide knowledge, his many-sided culture, 
the rapidity with which he seized points and his genius in criticism. 
He would break into joyous laughter when he succeeded in 
destroying a false tradition or in reconstructing events as they 
occurred. At this, time, when his name was becoming known 
in ever wider circles, I made his intimate acquaintance and felt 
myself powerfully attracted by him. He was in the full strength 
of early manhood, and everything in him was movement and 
zeal.' Other traits are added by Sybel in his memorial address. 
' The Seminar was founded for those who chose history as their 
profession. He allowed free choice of theme, but was always 
ready with suggestions. Sins against the canons of criticism 
met with a merciless judgment couched in friendly terms. The 
master encouraged each talent to develop along its own lines.' 
The Seminar would have in any case influenced the world 
by leaving an ineffaceable stamp on its members ; but it was 
to make a more direct appeal. In 1834 the Professor persuaded 
the University to offer a prize for an essay on Henry I. Waitz 
and Giesebrecht, Kopke and Hirsch competed. The prize was 
won by Waitz ; but the unsuccessful candidates had also learned 
to love mediaeval history. The merit of the essays and the enthu- 
siasm aroused in their authors suggested to Ranke that his pupils 
should undertake some co-operative task. Though his own 
studies lay chiefly in modern history, he directed them to the 
more difficult paths of the Middle Ages. As Stenzel had chosen 
the Franconians and Raumer the Hohenstaufen, the Saxon 
Emperors were selected. ' Unforgetable were the hours we spent 
on the Annals,' wrote Giesebrecht in his memorial notice of 
Kopke. 1 ' The charm of the first attack on a large literary 
undertaking was heightened by the co-operation of a number of 
young men at work on a common task with which they were to 
appear before the world, desiring to honour both their incom- 
parable teacher and themselves. We were led by Waitz, and a 
close friendship arose between us. The circle soon broke up, 
some leaving Berlin ; but each of us had found his life-work.' 
Ranke wrote the preface to the Annals, which began to appear in 
1837. The first volume was Waitz's prize essay on Henry I, 
revised and enlarged. Kopke and Donniges shared Otto the 
Great. The two later Ottos were undertaken by Giesebrecht and 
Wilmans. The authors built up an unvarnished narrative of 
events on the basis of the whole available material. These little 
1 Historisches Taschenbuch, 1872. 



RANKE'S CRITICS AND PUPILS 115 

volumes, following on Stenzel's narrative, inaugurated the critical CHAP, 
study of the Middle Ages. VII 

Before approaching the three great scholars whose names are 
imperishably associated with their master, we may glance at one 
or two other members of that famous circle. Kopke, who had 
won the second prize in the competition on Henry I, became a 
colleague of Ranke at Berlin, collaborated in the Monumenta, 
and wrote on Hroswitha and other persons and events of the 
Middle Ages. At his death his old master declared in touching 
words that it was God's grace to have been connected with so pure 
a soul for more than a generation. Hirsch likewise became 
Professor at Berlin, and devoted the greater part of a short life 
to his monumental study of Henry II. Wilmans rendered 
valuable service to the Monumenta. Donniges, after a brief 
professorial career at Berlin, entered the service of Maximilian 
of Bavaria and exchanged history for diplomacy. Adolf Schmidt 
deserted the Middle Ages for antiquity and the French Revolu- 
tion ; but he deserves mention as editor of the first serious 
historical review, the pages of which were largely filled with the 
contributions of his fellow-pupils. Among others who passed 
through the Seminar in its early years were Nitzsch and Duncker, 
Burckhardt and Gneist, Roscher and Pauli. 1 

The master always declared that he had never seen such 
burning zeal in any pupil as in Jaffe, 3 a Polish Jew, who early 
resolved to attempt for the Popes what Bohmer had achieved for 
the Emperors. In 1851 appeared the ' Regesta Pontificum ' to the 
accession of Innocent III, containing 11,000 documents, letters 
and bulls, many copied direct from manuscripts discovered by 
himself. The work left Bohmer far behind in critical method, 
and was of scarcely less value for the Empire than for the Church. 
He next threw himself into the work of the Monumenta ; but 
on the ground of its slow progress he devoted his later years to the 
independent publication of materials for German history in 
handy form, modelled on Bohmer's ' Fontes.' Each of the six 
volumes of his ' Bibliotheca Rerum Germanicarum ' was grouped 
round a man or a place — Boniface and Hildebrand, Charles the 
Great and Alcuin, Corvey and Bamberg. Furnished with 
introductions and summaries and containing a good deal of new 
material, they rendered the study of the Middle Ages at first hand 

1 Ranke's Zur eigenen Lebensgeschichte, 1890, contains much of his 
correspondence with his pupils. There is interesting material in ' Briefe 
an Ranke von einigen seiner Schiiler,' Hist. Zeitschrift, vol. cvii. 

2 See Dove's article in Allg. deutsche Biog., reprinted in Ausgewahlte 
Sckriftchen, 1898. 



li6 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, singularly agreeable. His suicide in 1870 at the age of fifty-one 
VII was an irreparable blow to mediaeval studies, and deprived 
German scholarship of one of its most exact and brilliant brains. 
Among Ranke's pupils was Maximilian of Bavaria. 1 After 
attending the classes of Heeren and Dahlmann at Gottingen, 
the prince passed to Berlin, and a life-long intimacy commenced 
which was to bear golden fruit for historical studies. Looking 
back on his royal friend in his ninetieth year Ranke declared that, 
though inferior to Frederick William IV in personality and 
breadth of culture, he was peculiarly thoughtful. On his death 
he wrote of him as ' my best friend, my truest pupil, my most 
eager reader, my kindest patron. Though we disagreed in many 
things, there was never a shadow between us.' Their letters 
breathe warm affection and intellectual sympathy. ' I have not 
only read but studied your book on the Reformation,' wrote 
the Catholic prince in 1845. The correspondence ranged over 
national and international politics as well as scholarship. When 
the abdication of Ludwig I in 1848 brought Maximilian to the 
throne, he determined to utilise his friendship with the greatest 
of German historians for the benefit of his kingdom. What his 
father had done for art he would do for historical science. ' It 
is my earnest desire,' he wrote in 1853, ' to bring you to Munich. 
My object is the planting of the new historical method and the 
foundation of an historical school in Bavaria like that of North 
Germany.' The letter was signed ' Your old pupil ' ; but Ranke 
refused to desert Berlin. In the following year he visited the 
King at Berchtesgaden, and delivered the lectures on the Epochs 
of Modern History which were published after his death. 

The King realised that for the fulfilment of his aim scholars 
must be imported ; and as Ranke was not to be had, he accepted 
his advice to call Sybel, who was shortly followed by Cornelius 
and Giesebrecht. The next step was to found the Historical 
Commission of the Bavarian Academy, 3 with Ranke as President 
and Sybel as Secretary. Though bearing a Bavarian title and 
supported by Bavarian funds, the Historical Commission formed 
a common ground for all German-speaking historical scholars, and 
has done more to further historical studies than any other in- 
stitution. Ranke virtually chose the first members, and the 

1 See Dove, ' Ranke u. Sybel in ihrem Verhaltniss zu Konig Max,' in 
Ausgewdhlte Schriftchen, 1898 ; and Ranke's memorial address, Abh. u. 
Versuche, neue Sammlung, 507-16, 1888. Part of their correspondence 
was published in the Deutsche Revue, 1904. 

2 See Sybel u. Giesebrecht, Die Historische Commission, 1858-83, 1883 ; 
and Moriz Ritter's article in Hist. Zeitsckrift, vol. ciii. 



RANKE'S CRITICS AND PUPILS 117 

annual meetings brought together the leading historians of CHAP. 
Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Among its publications VII 
are the ' Dictionary of German Biography,' only recently com- 
pleted ; the ' Histories of the Sciences ' ; the ' Chronicles of the 
German Towns,' with which the name of Karl Hegel is insepar- 
ably connected; the ' Annals of the Mediaeval Empire,' and the 
' Acts of the Imperial Diet,' in which Julius Weizsacker won 
enduring fame. Of more local interest was the correspondence of 
the Wittelsbachs during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 
A large part of this immense burden was borne by Ranke's pupils, 
who also took a leading share in the Hislorische Zeitschrift 
founded in 1859 under the editorship of Sybel. Before the death 
of the King in 1866 he had the satisfaction of knowing that his 
ideal had been fully realised. The credit of the idea belongs to 
the ruler. That it was carried out is the merit of his beloved 
teacher. 



Ill 

When Ranke was surrounded by his children and grandchildren 
he used to say, ' I have another and older family, my pupils and 
their pupils.' His son relates that he was prouder of Sybel's 
' French Revolution ' than of any of his own books. ' With 
Waitz and Sybel,' he wrote to Giesebrecht in 1877, ' you make 
my glory as teacher complete.' German historiography is 
largely the story of the fellow-work of these four men. 

Of the three the oldest and the greatest was Waitz. 1 While 
at school he devoured Niebuhr's revised volumes as they appeared. 
' From him I learned to love constitutional history. To emulate 
him became my highest goal.' He studied law at Kiel, and like 
Mommsen passed from law to history. On entering Berlin in 
1833 a ^ the age of twenty he attended the lectures of Savigny, 
but soon found his true vocation in Ranke's Seminar. ' I met 
him in Ranke's circle,' wrote Sybel half a century later, ' and still 
remember how his superior knowledge and incisive criticism 
impressed me, while his friendliness made his acquaintance 
a delight. Conscientiousness was ever his leading characteristic' 
He won the hotly contested prize on Henry I, and, next to Ranke 
himself, was the leading spirit in the Saxon Annals. It was 
intended to add a series of critical studies of the sources ; but 

1 The best accounts are by Kluckhohn, Vortrdge u. Aufsdtze, 1894 ; 
Wattenbach in Abhandlungen der Berliner Akademie, 1886 ; Sybel, Vortrdge 
u. Abhandlungen, 1897; Frensdorff in Allg. deutsche Biog. A brief 
autobiography is prefixed to his little volume, Deutsche Kaiser, 1862. 



n8 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, only one volume appeared. Ranke had pointed out in the 
VII Seminar that the Chronicle of Corvey was of little value, and 
Waitz and Hirsch proved it a forgery. It was his first important 
discovery. When help was needed for the Monumenta, Ranke 
recommended Waitz, who devoted the next few years to the great 
national undertaking. By copying and collating manuscripts 
in many archives he produced editions which surpassed in value 
those of his chief. The record of his fruitful activity may be 
read in his contributions to the journal of the Society. Waitz's 
life was to end, as it began, in devotion to the work with which 
his name is more closely associated than any other scholar but 
Pertz himself. His old master watched his rapid advance with 
rapture. ' Your bold progress,' he wrote in 1838, • evokes my 
greatest sympathy and joy. You are treading the path of Baluze 
and Mabillon.' Later he wrote, ' It will be counted merit to me 
in my biography to have contributed to direct such a force as 
yours to the study of history.' 

The next chapter opens in 1842 with his appointment to 
Kiel, where he began the chief task of his life. The first volume 
of the ' German Constitutional History ' appeared in 1844, and 
was naturally dedicated to Ranke. ' It is a sign of my grateful 
memory of the time when you were both teacher and friend, 
a proof of my affection and love.' The second edition, issued in 
1865, renewed the dedication. ' It is a gift from one of the many 
who think of you with gratitude and love, you who taught us the 
methods of strict historical research and deep penetration into the 
life of all times and peoples.' The third edition, published in 
1879, once more gave expression to the undying gratitude of the 
author, now an old man, to his octogenarian master. The first 
volume dealt with the origins, customs and institutions of the 
early races of Germany till the Frankish conquest of Gaul, and 
was in large measure a commentary on Tacitus, whose testimony 
is accepted as thoroughly trustworthy. He expresses a high 
opinion of the Germans and their civilisation, examines the family, 
inheritance, wergeld, the classes, political institutions and the 
army, making full use of Grimm's ' Legal Antiquities ' and of 
Scandinavian scholarship. He declares popular assemblies to 
have been the central point of the life of the State. Real 
monarchy, apart from mere military leadership, existed, though it 
was not universal. When charged with drawing a dim picture, he 
replied that he could not say more than was found in the sources. 
' We cannot recreate the life in its entirety, as we know it chiefly 
from foreigners and from later developments ; but its general 
character is certain.' The work was at once recognised as authori- 



RANKE'S CRITICS AND PUPILS 119 

tative. Waitz was the first to master the whole mass of material CHAP, 
and to interpret it in the light of other Teutonic experience. VI * 
It did not, however, escape criticism. Sybel sharply challenged 
his view of kingship, declaring that early German society knew 
nothing of royalty, which was derived later from Roman sources. 
Waitz issued a lengthy reply and lived long enough to see his view 
of kingship as German not Roman generally accepted. A com- 
prehensive attack was to come a generation later from Fustel de 
Coulanges, who totally rejected his picture of a high civilisation 
among the German tribes. 

The second volume dealt with Merovingian institutions, which 
he pronounced to be of pure German origin. The third and fourth 
volumes covered the Carolingian era, the fifth to the eighth being 
devoted to the Saxon and Franconian dynasties and bringing the 
survey down to the twelfth century. If the latter half of the 
work is inferior in interest and value to the former, the historian 
can scarcely be blamed. From the Carolingians to the Hohen- 
staufen the history of German law was almost a blank, and it is 
Waitz's merit to have been the first to attempt to map the country. 
The value of the attempt was recognised, even though Sohm and 
other admirers hinted that it was rather a collection of materials 
than a constitutional history. While the first four volumes 
were thoroughly revised by the author, the last four had to wait 
for revision by his pupils after his death. The ' Constitutional 
History ' rendered possible the reconstruction of the political 
life of mediaeval Germany. But though one of the most precious 
possessions of the scholar, it has naturally failed to appeal to the 
amateur. Waitz lacked the literary skill which makes Stubbs 
readable and sometimes delightful. Nor did he weave his 
material into a broad narrative of national development like the 
Oxford Professor. Moreover his work, though twice the length 
of its English counterpart, covers a far shorter period. It is 
rather a series of massive dissertations than a history. Yet while 
lacking popular appeal it amply fulfils the demands of science. 
It superseded Eichhorn for the early Middle Ages, and even after 
the appearance of Brunner it remains a work to which the student 
of Teutonic institutions must have frequent recourse. 

Like his colleague Droysen, Waitz was keenly interested in 
the fortunes of his native Schleswig-Holstein, and was drawn into 
active politics by Danish encroachments. He was a deputy of the 
University in the Holstein estates, aided Droysen with materials 
for his defence of the historic rights of the Duchies, and was 
driven from Kiel in 1848. At Frankfurt he worked with Dahl- 
mann and Droysen, and shared their hopes and disappointments. 



120 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. His interest in the Duchies survived his departure, and he set 
VII to work to compose their history. Two volumes brought the 
story to 1660. ' When I left Kiel/ he wrote in the Letter 
to Jacob Grimm, which served as preface, ' I thought that this 
would bind me to the country. Schleswig-Holstein must never 
despair of the future of the German fatherland.' It was left 
incomplete, because he had not time to study all the archives 
and refused to write unless he could do so. It was while thus 
engaged that he discovered materials which he worked into his 
great monograph on Wullenweber. His studies in many archives 
enabled him to recreate the manifold activities of the Hansa 
League in the sixteenth century, to revive the impressive figure 
of the Lubeck burgomaster, and to unravel a curious chapter 
in the history of European diplomacy. The ' Wullenweber ' is 
the most lively of his books, and is the only one in which the 
foreground is occupied by a personality. 

On his expulsion from Kiel, Waitz accepted a call to Gottingen. 
His courses covered a wide range, and were frequented by jurists 
as well as historians. ' He had full notes,' records Kluckhohn, 
' and attended more to them than to his hearers ; but the lectures 
lacked neither life nor movement. He spoke so slowly and 
clearly that it was possible to write almost everything down, 
and we were anxious not to miss a word. His audiences were 
not large, but were composed of the best material.' During a 
quarter of a century his Seminar was the most famous in Europe, 
and with few exceptions all serious medievalists went to Gottin- 
gen for their scientific baptism. His method was that which 
he had learned at Berlin, and Ranke was justified in saying 
' Your pupils are my pupils.' The most vivid picture of the 
famous Seminar has been painted by Gabriel Monod, 1 who was a 
member in 1868. When the eager young Frenchman expressed 
his gratitude for his writings, Waitz replied that his best and 
most successful works were his pupils. ' My books will be super- 
seded and forgotten ; but they will have helped to make scholars 
who will write better ones.' His immense influence seemed to 
Monod to spring largely from his moral qualities. It was obvious 
that he desired to form men as well as savants. Critics used 
to complain that he never encouraged his pupils to rise above 
the technical study of sources ; but he knew that artistic sense 
and philosophic grasp could not be taught. His influence un- 
doubtedly led to the cult of detail ; and Monod admits that some 
of them came to think that only the infinitely little could be 
effectively studied. If his influence was thus rather towards 
1 In Portraits et Souvenirs, 1897. 



RANKE'S CRITICS AND PUPILS 121 

intensive than extensive culture, the benefit to mediaeval studies CHAP, 
of an army of exact workers cannot be exaggerated. The V H 
value of his training was apparent in Eduard Winkelmann and 
innumerable other medievalists. Next to Ranke himself he was 
the greatest founder of a school. 

In addition to his professorial duties, the unending labour 
of the Constitutional History, and unceasing co-operation in the 
Monumenta, Waitz carried out a vast quantity of miscellaneous 
work. 1 The Forschungen zur deutschen Geschichte, which he per- 
suaded the Historical Commission to establish, was carried on 
under his direction for a quarter of a century, and almost every 
number contains a contribution from his pen. He published 
a volume, based on his lectures, on political science, another on 
the Emperors from Charles the Great to Maximilian. He revised 
and enlarged his youthful work on Henry I. He revised Dahl- 
rnann's bibliography of German history. He took a large share 
in the direction of the Historical Commission, and rendered 
valuable assistance to the Hansa Historical Society. As Ranke 
gradually withdrew from active work, Gottingen took the place 
of Berlin. The famous scholar loved the University of his 
adoption, and it was with reluctance that in 1875 he accepted the 
call to assume the supreme direction of the Monumenta, for 
which he had worked for forty years. The great national enter- 
prise, now amply subsidised, entered on a new life. Reverting 
to the activities of his youth, he visited foreign archives in 
search of manuscripts, and again recorded his experiences in the 
journal. Mommsen, Sickel and other leading scholars lent their 
services, and the Director was aided by many of his old pupils. 
After his death his editorial policy was sharply attacked by 
Ottokar Lorenz, 2 who complained that he published worthless 
sources and too many selections from foreign writers, while the 
work as a whole lacked chronological or geographical sequence. 
It is arguable that one or two works should have been omitted ; 
but Waitz's ten years' stewardship stand out as a period of wisely 
directed activity. 

Among those who welcomed his return to Berlin was his 
old master. Ranke was never tired of expressing his admira- 
tion and affection for his greatest pupil. ' My chief joy,' he 
wrote in 1865, ' is the friendship with which a man like you repays 
the stimulus he perhaps received from me in youth.' ' That 
which we began quietly,' he wrote in 1884, ' has grown to be 

1 See Steindorff's Bibliographische Vbersicht, 1886. 

2 Preface to vol. ii. of Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen, third ed., 1887. 
Waitz was defended by Weiland, Hist. Zeitschrift, vol. lviii. 



122 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, a great tree, in which the birds of the air make their nests. I told 
VII Waitz at that time that he seemed to me to be destined to become 
the German Muratori.' Master and pupil died on the same day, 
the former aged ninety, the latter seventy-three. The one 
transformed the study of modern, the other of mediaeval history. 
While Ranke's books were read all over the world, Waitz worked 
and wrote for scholars, and it is only scholars who can measure 
the magnitude of his services. 



IV 

The second of Ranke's pupils to obtain world-wide fame was 
Giesebrecht, 1 whose early monograph on Otto II was one of the 
best of the Saxon Annals. The Emperor had been neglected both 
by contemporary and modern historians, overshadowed by his 
great father and his brilliant son. A year later he performed a 
task which ranks high among critical achievements. A chronicle 
of the time of Henry III was partially known through fifteenth 
and sixteenth century writers. From these indications he set 
to work to reconstruct the lost annals ; and a generation later 
the discovery of Aventin's copy of the ' Annales Altahenses ' 
established the accuracy of his workmanship. A grant enabled 
the young scholar to spend three years in Austria and Italy, which 
he used in amassing material for the work on the mediaeval 
Empire which he had already resolved to undertake. He had 
learned from Ranke the secrets of the critical art ; but he pos- 
sessed other qualifications for the task of his life. He had grown 
up amid memories of the French occupation and the wars of libera- 
tion. Like his master he was never affected by the liberal ideas 
and constitutional movements of his youth, and disliked France 
as the source of revolutionary contamination. The Berlin 
riots of 1848, of which he was an eye-witness, strengthened his 
conservative leanings. To prepare for a better future it was 
necessary to return to the noble ideals of the past — a powerful 
Empire, a vigorous Church, a God-fearing people. ' From my 
youth up,' he wrote, ' I have been filled with the conviction that 
the German nation can only regain its lost place in the world by 
closer unity. For decades I have given this conviction unflinching 
utterance and have championed it in every sphere open to me, 
and from this my book has grown.' 

1 See Riezler, Geddchtnissrede, 1891 ; Heigel, Essays aus neuerer 
Geschichte, 1892; Sybel, Vortrdge u. Abhandlungen, 1897. Acton's brief 
appreciation, Historical Essays and Studies, 1907, is a masterpiece. 



RANKE'S CRITICS AND PUPILS 123 

After twenty years of study the first volume of the ' History CHAP, 
of the German Imperial Era ' appeared in 1855. The term VII 
Kaiserzeit, he explained, was invented to denote the time when 
the Emperors controlled the fortunes of the West, when the 
German races became one people, when Germany reached the 
highest point in her history. The country had suffered and still 
suffered so grievously from disunion that all Germans ardently 
desired to revive a single, mighty State, though they disagreed 
as to the means of its realisation. Perhaps the study of this 
distant time might contribute to agreement — the time which 
speaks to us in the lofty minsters, the walls of ancient cities, 
the mossy castles, the sagas and the ballads. Modern ideas 
were so different that it was hardly realised that the men of old 
were of the same flesh and blood. ' I desire to bridge the gulf 
between science and the people, and I wish to be judged in the 
light of that endeavour.' His first plan was to offer a simple 
narrative, without notes or references ; but as the book contained 
much that was new he felt it his duty to satisfy the legitimate 
demands of students. None the less he hoped that it would be 
read by teachers in schools and even by their best pupils. Let 
them learn how greatness once came from the Christian and heroic 
virtues of their forefathers. ' History teaches that the soul is 
more than the body. The science of German history is a torch 
which lights our path and throws its beams forward as well as 
backward.' The work was dedicated to Frederick William IV, 
the Christian King. 

It was the historian's intention to bring his narrative to the 
end of the Hohenstaufen, and to complete it in three volumes ; 
but the plan was modified owing to its phenomenal success, 
and when he died thirty-four years later he was still in the reign 
of Barbarossa. The work, though incomplete, embraced three 
centuries crowded with incident and romance. Beginning with 
a slight sketch of the Carolingian Empire the narrative broadens 
with the Saxon Emperors. The middle portion describes the epic 
struggle of Henry IV and Hildebrand, and the closing volumes 
are dominated by the majestic figure of Barbarossa. The whole 
era is depicted as one of heroism and piety. He speaks of the 
great Emperors with a sort of mystical fervour. The picture is 
aglow with colour and aflame with national pride. ' The Empire,' 
he declares, ' made the Germans one people. In the tenth 
century the name of German was rare, in the eleventh it was 
common ; and it betokened the people of might, the people by 
whom things were decided, the people of peoples.' In his 
memorial notice of Ranke, Giesebrecht declares that his lack of 



124 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, moral warmth diminished his popularity. ' Most readers of 
VII historical books seek not only instruction but moral stimulus.' 
This tonic the Kaiserzeit offered in abundant measure to a dis- 
spirited generation. It is an epic, related with epical breadth. 
He said of his master that he was a great painter of situations 
but not a great narrator. The verdict on his own achievement 
is just the reverse. He was greatest as a narrator. In his frag- 
ment of 1884, ' The Old Pupils/ Ranke declared that Giesebrecht 
had a poetical vein and knew how to write in the far-off days half 
a century before. Of the three great pupils he is the only master 
of style. Waitz utterly lacked literary faculty. Sybel's prose, 
though clear and vigorous, was destitute of grace and charm. 

If the public was captured by the moral fervour and the decora- 
tive style, the book won the applause of a smaller and more critical 
audience by its scholarship. His reputation as a critic was 
confirmed and extended. Bohmer hailed him as the soundest of 
mediaeval scholars. ' His notes,' declared Acton, ' contain the 
most penetrating and instructive discussion of authorities to be 
found anywhere in modern literature.' To specialists, indeed, 
they were a richer prize than the text. With Giesebrecht 
criticism was a constructive, not a destructive science. Even 
Scheffer-Boichorst was impressed, and remarked to Simonsfeld, 
who undertook Barbarossa for the Jahrbucher, that his work was 
needless, since Giesebrecht was enough. Of course it was im- 
possible that he should satisfy every scholar. His judgment 
of Lambert of Herzfeld, for instance, was too favourable. Though 
a champion of the Empire, he has a genuine admiration for the 
Papacy. He describes events, but is sparing in judgments on 
the ideas which underlie them. If the figure of Hildebrand to 
some extent shrinks in his pages, it is only because he shows how 
he built up his system instead of hurling it ready-made in the 
face of the age. His volumes were read with equal delight by 
Protestants and Catholics, in North and in South Germany. 

The only discordant note was struck by Sybel. In an address 
to the Bavarian Academy in 1859, on Narratives of the Imperial 
Era, 1 Sybel praised its technique, its exceptional literary talent, 
its warm religious sense, and its sincere patriotism. On the 
other hand he was unable to accept its dominating principle. 
Giesebrecht believed that the Empire was both national and 
beneficial, and looked back to it with admiration and regret. 
To Sybel this conception appeared fundamentally unsound. 
The reverence for the old Empire, he declared, was quite recent. 
Raumer had painted in the aesthetic, not the historic spirit. 
1 Published 1859 and never reprinted. 



RANKE'S CRITICS AND PUPILS 125 

1 Each stately and brilliant figure finds its place and receives its CHAP, 
colour ; but he never inquires what the country lost or gained VII 
by them.' Giesebrecht was far ahead of his predecessors in 
knowledge and technique, but he failed to bring his subject to the 
test of principles. Had he done so, he would have found that the 
Emperors gravely damaged the German nation by their univer- 
salism, and that their true policy was to build up a compact 
and vigorous national life. He contrasts Henry the Fowler, ' the 
first King of the German nation, the founder of the German 
Kingdom, the finest star in the broad firmament of our history,' 
with Henry VI, poised at a giddy height and reaching out a 
conquering arm in every direction. 

This spirited attack provoked a reply not from Giesebrecht 
himself, who always avoided controversy, but from Ficker, 1 
who accused Sybel of importing contemporary conceptions and 
controversies into a far distant age, and maintained that nation- 
alism was then unknown. The tendencies of the age were to 
universalism. Otto's Empire was neither a world monarchy 
nor a national state, but grew naturally out of the time. Italy 
suffered most after the fall of the Empire, and Dante longed for 
its restoration. The Empire fell, not because it was founded on 
false principles but because Sicily destroyed the German kingship. 
Without the Empire, Germany would have gone to pieces sooner. 
Ficker's little volume, resting on profound knowledge, was an 
effective defence of the main lines of Giesebrecht 's conception. 
Sybel returned to the charge in a booklet ' The German Nation and 
the Empire.' In answer to Ficker he rejoined that he tested 
policies by their compatibility with German interests. The 
centralised empire of Charles the Great was detrimental to 
youthful races, which needed free play. Henry I was a national 
King, without Imperial pretences. Otto the Great, the second 
founder of the Empire, reverted to the claim, half Roman, half 
Christian, to rule over Christendom. The fall of the Empire in 
the thirteenth century was a blessing for German nationality. 
The book ends by repudiating Ficker's contention that Austria 
represented the mediaeval Empire. She had been purely dynastic 
and clerical, and had never given a thought to the well-being 
of Germany, of which Prussia was the true leader. 

The polemic against Austria removed the question from the 
tranquil sphere of historical discussion ; but a different and more 
justifiable charge came from another quarter. In a forcible 
pamphlet a Slavonic scholar protested against the limitless 

1 Seech. 13; ' Der Streit mit Sybel,' in Jung's admirable life of Ficker, 
1907, 



i 2 6 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, idealisation of the German race. 1 In a national work admiration 
VI1 for the race and its history was natural ; but here it passed all 
bounds. The historian's pages were filled with references to 
German love of freedom, German loyalty, German thoroughness. 
' Our race had to fulfil its destiny for its own honour and for the 
good of mankind.' It was a Power ' ordered by God,' with a 
world-historic mission. The author had two moral standards, 
one for Germans, another for the rest of mankind. He declared 
German rule to have raised the moral standard of Italy, though 
his own pages recorded the terrible devastations of German armies. 
The book, declared the critic, was full of contradictions. While 
the Germans were the embodiment of every virtue, the centuries 
were dark and bloody. 

Giesebrecht's Imperialism and pride in his race helped to 
make his book the political and moral influence that he had 
desired. He declared that historiography always followed the 
great impulses of public life. ' Ours is more national now 
because we are all more conscious of nationality. It will first 
show its full strength when a German State renders us master of 
our own destinies.' In 1871, when the happy consummation had 
been reached, the historian confessed that the old Empire had 
neither saved the nation from splitting up nor kept German 
territory inviolate. That the new Empire had taken a better 
form than that which he had glorified was a crowning mercy. 
' Your great work,' wrote Ranke to his old pupil in 1878, ' fills me 
with joy and satisfaction. You combine criticism with a loving, 
poetic patriotism, and your presentation is at once virile and 
childlike. It is a work that has grown into the time and its 
movements.' But just because it formed such an intimate part 
of its time, a new time has left it behind. We have outlived the 
romanticism which possessed Giesebrecht hardly less strongly 
than Raumer. The golden glow has faded into the light of 
common day. It belongs to its time, again, as a record of action 
rather than a study of problems. The constitutional, economic 
and intellectual elements are almost wholly neglected. Yet its 
sterling scholarship preserves it from the oblivion which has 
overtaken nearly every monument of the romantic and patriotic 
schools. 

Giesebrecht, like Macaulay, succeeded in his ambition of 
writing a book which the people would read ; but, unlike Macau- 
lay, he commanded the confidence of scholars. When Sybel's 
pugnacity made him impossible in Munich, King Max wrote to 
Giesebrecht : ' My whole hope of furthering historical studies 
1 Lepar, Uber die Tendenz von Giesebrecht's Geschichte, Prague, 1S68. 



RANKE'S CRITICS AND PUPILS 127 

lies in you.' He arrived in 1862 and succeeded where his CHAP, 
predecessor had failed. He proved himself to be as Ranke VII 
described him in 1863, ' a pure, well-meaning, deeply cultured 
and trustworthy man, gentle but not without a kernel.' He was 
an original member of the Historical Commission, and on his 
arrival in Munich became its secretary. As the President became 
too infirm to attend the annual meetings, he represented him 
and carried out his double task with unflagging energy. On 
Ranke's death he modestly refused the reversion, which passed 
to Sybel. In 1874 he revived the series of histories begun by 
Heeren and Ukert, and when Waitz took over the Monumenta 
he joined the board of control. His academic tasks and the 
repeated revisions of his earlier volumes impeded the progress 
of the Kaiserzeit ; but the quality of the work showed no deterio- 
ration, and the reign of Barbarossa is one of its most perfect 
parts. His position among historians has been defined by Acton 
with incomparable skill. ' He never became a European 
classic, like Ranke and Mommsen. He was neither the head of a 
school like Waitz, nor the chief of a party like Sybel. Disciples of 
Baur knew more than he of the growth of doctrines, and disciples 
of Richter about ecclesiastical institutions. Sohm and Gierke 
were superior to him in politics and law, Ficker and Denifle were 
more powerful originators. He did not speak with authority of 
things that came before Clovis or after Manfred. Nobody 
turned to him for explanation of the civil code, the rise of univer- 
sities, the philosophy of Abelard, or the significance of Citeaux. 
His limitations were distinctly marked, and they were part of his 
strength. He spent a long life in mastering a single epoch and 
writing a single book. But among all his countrymen employed 
on the Middle Ages no one was more widely known and read and 
trusted ; and the Kaiserzeit was the nearest mediaeval equivalent 
of the Romische Geschichte and the Zeitalter der Reformation.' 



V 

The youngest and most brilliant of Ranke's three great 
pupils was destined to a career widely different from the tranquil 
fortunes of Waitz and Giesebrecht. Sybel x devoted his strength 
to renewing the connection of history with politics which his 
master had done his utmost to break. It is, therefore, only in his 
early years that he can be counted a member of the Ranke school. 

1 See Varrentrapp's admirable biography prefixed to Sybel's Vortrdge u, 
Abhandhmgen, 1897. 



i 2 8 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. A child of the Rhineland, he grew up in an atmosphere more 
VII liberal than was to be found elsewhere in North Germany ; but 
the Protestants, who were almost lost in the Catholic mass, 
looked to Prussia as their champion. Thus the future spokesman 
of the National Liberals learned at home the two dominating 
principles of his later career, constitutionalism and Prussian 
hegemony. Like Waitz, he pored over Niebuhr's Roman History 
while still at school, and learned to love Burke, ' who was a 
permanent influence in my political orientation.' Reaching 
Berlin in 1834, a ^ the early age of seventeen, he was at once 
admitted into Ranke's Seminar ; and he was never weary of 
expressing his gratitude to his incomparable master. ' You 
have shown me the way to science,' he testified in 1867, ' you 
have always been my model. I have no dearer hope than that 
my name will be worthy of a place in the long list of your pupils.' 
Sybel took no part in the Saxon Annals ; but his Doctor's 
dissertation on Jordanes was suggested by his master, and won 
the praises of Waitz and, in a later generation, of Mommsen. 
Among the theses that he defended in the examination was that 
the fortunes of peoples depended on individuals, not on institu- 
tions, and that the writing of history sine if a et studio was a false 
ideal. Thus he already began to show the independence which 
was to lead him far from his youthful moorings. ' Ranke 
opened for Sybel the portals of the temple of science,' declares 
Bailleu with truth, ' but he made his own way inside.' His 
first important work was likewise the outcome of the suggestion 
of his master, who had pointed out that William of Tyre and 
Albert of Aachen were dangerous guides. Acting on this hint 
Sybel examined the whole range of sources, and on the conclusion 
of his scrutiny wrote his ' History of the First Crusade.' Ranke 
hailed the book as a wholly admirable achievement, and declared 
himself proud to possess such a pupil. Not less eulogistic was 
the verdict of Stenzel. The ' First Crusade ' deserved all the 
praise it received, both in its critical and narrative aspects. 
He destroyed many legends, robbed Peter the Hermit and 
Godfrey of Bouillon of their aureole, and constructed a plain 
tale from the best authorities. The pious Hofler complained 
that he put the chroniclers under the anatomical knife. The 
work remained the standard account of a great European 
event till Kugler and Rohricht — a long life for the work of a 
young man of twenty-four. 

Sybel, now Docent at Bonn, lectured on the V olkerwanderung, 
and was soon immersed in the study of early German institutions. 
' The Origin of German Kingship,' published in 1844, covered 



RANKE'S CRITICS AND PUPILS 129 

part of the same ground as the first volume of Waitz, which CHAP, 
appeared in the same year, but reached widely different con- VII 
elusions. He found in Caesar a disposition to culture, not culture 
itself. Starting from agrarian conditions he made use of the 
researches of Hanssen. The V olkerwandemng, he declared, was 
only intelligible if the Germans were semi-nomadic. Tribal 
organisation was incapable of producing a true state life, which 
arose from the fructifying influence of Roman culture. Among 
the greatest debts of German civilisation to Rome was monarchy. 
Leo, who had himself emphasised Roman influences in the 
political development of the Germans, was loud in his praises j 
but Waitz maintained that his view degraded the Germans, 
and rejected his theories of Roman influence and the tribal 
constitution. 

The Middle Ages cast no glamour over Sybel, and the year 
of the ' German Kingship ' witnessed the first of his many bouts 
with the Roman Church. A vast number of pilgrims, calculated 
at a million, came to Trier to view the Holy Coat. The young 
Docent was disgusted, and with the aid of a colleague rapidly 
collected material for a booklet, in which he declared that he 
had found traces of twenty other Holy Coats. Thousands of 
copies of this spirited pamphlet were sold, and a second part 
was added in reply to Catholic criticisms. Though the authors 
declared that their attack was not on the Roman Church but 
on a false relic, the Catholics never forgave him, and Sybel 
was confirmed in his conviction that Catholicism was the 
stronghold of obscurantism. The champion of Protestantism 
was rewarded by a call to his first professorial chair at 
Marburg. The lectures which it was his duty to deliver 
on the modern world and on German history since 1815 
increased his interest in the problems of his own time, while 
the misrule of the Elector of Hesse provoked his indignation. 
His conversion from a mediaevalist was completed by the 
events of 1848, which led him straight to the French Revolution. 
Henceforth the allegiance to Ranke is at an end, and the life of 
Sybel becomes merged in the fortunes of the Prussian School. 



(I 



CHAPTER VIII 



THE PRUSSIAN SCHOOL 



CHAP. Ranke began his career and founded his school in the era of 
VIII political stagnation between the wars of liberation and the 
revolution of 1848 ; but in the middle of the century the atti- 
tude of detachment from the burning problems of the day 
became impossible. In the making of the German Empire 
no small part fell to the group of Professors who by tongue and 
pen preached the gospel of nationality, glorified the achievements 
of the Hohenzollerns, and led their countrymen from idealism 
to realism. 



The spiritual father of the Prussian School was Dahlmann. 1 
The French invasion filled him with indignation, and, in com- 
pany with Kleist, with whom hatred of Napoleon amounted to a 
consuming passion, he walked across Germany to Aspern after 
the battle to join the Austrian forces. Though he had never 
attended a lecture on history, he was appointed to a chair at 
Kiel in 1812. His first publication was a study of Saxo Gram- 
maticus, applying the critical methods which he had learned 
from Wolf at Halle. Scandinavian circles were scandalised 
by the overthrow of their idol ; but Stein was so delighted that 
he invited him to aid the Monumenta. He agreed to help, but 
after some minor contributions withdrew on the ground that 
certain members of the reactionary Bundestag had become con- 
nected with the enterprise. The middle years of his life were 

1 Springer's F. C. Dahlmann, 1870-2, is a full and masterly biography. 
The best appreciations are by Waitz, Rede auf D., 1885 ; Treitschke, 
Aufsdtze, vol. i., 1865 ; Lorenz, Die Geschichtswissenschaft, chap. 2, 1886 ; 
Sybel, Drei Bonner Historiker, in Vortrdge u. Aufsdtze, 1874 ; and Marcks, 
Manner u. Zeiten, vol. i., 1911. Janssen's study in Zeit- u. Lebensbilder, 
1889, gives the Catholic view. 



THE PRUSSIAN SCHOOL 131 

devoted to a history of Denmark for the series of Heeren and CHAP. 
Ukert. He loved Teutonic antiquities and, like Freeman, sought v m 
traces of the freedom which was the pole-star of his life. Written 
with sympathy, learning and power, the work, which carried the 
story to the Reformation, won him honourable fame among the 
scholars of Europe. It was not, however, as an historian but as a 
political teacher that Dahlmann claims a place in a chapter on 
the Prussian School. He had early reached the conviction that 
constitutional monarchy was the best form of government, and 
his treatise on Politics, published in 1835, embodied his demand. 
His sincerity was tested in 1837, when he joined in the famous 
protest against the action of the King of Hanover. Ejected from 
Gottingen, he found refuge at Bonn, where he reached the highest 
point of his influence. His histories of the English and French 
Revolutions were frankly political, warning rulers of the con- 
sequence of attacking or refusing constitutions. Emerging in 
1848, he battled manfully for a liberal Empire under Prussian 
hegemony. After his bitter disappointment he gave up writing ; 
but he continued to teach the doctrines .of nationality and con- 
stitutionalism. The testimonies of colleagues and pupils to his 
massive personality are unanimous. Waitz spoke of him as 
granite and bronze, and declared that no one did more to spread 
the idea of a single Empire. Sybel describes his impressive 
oratory and restrained passion. Treitschke devoted one of his 
most consummate essays to the master to whom he owed more 
than to any other man, and who spanned the interval between 
literary and political Germany. 

The Prussian School owed part of its strength to the fact 
that its members were not all Prussian by birth or residence. 
Hausser x was won for history by the lectures of Schlosser at 
Heidelberg. His talent developed rapidly, and at twenty-seven 
he launched a detailed history of the Palatinate. The treatment 
of the Middle Ages was superficial ; but with the Reformation 
the stream broadens and deepens. The Thirty Years' War is 
treated at length, and the life and culture of Court and people in 
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are illustrated by new 
material. The full-length portrait of Karl Ludwig, the kernel 
of the book, is painted with remarkable power. In relating the 
fortunes of the Palatinate he never forgets the wider problems 
which confronted the German people. In addition to his great 
monograph he wrote detailed criticisms of historical works 

1 The best account is by Marcks in Heidelberger Projessoren, vol. L, 1903^ 
Cp. Kluckhohn, Vortrdge u. Aufsdtze, 1894, and Wattenbach, L. Hausser, 
Ein Vortrag, 1867. 

K 2 



132 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, in the Allgemeine Zeitung. He never appreciated Ranke's 
VIII greatness, and found him artificial and anaemic. His hero was 
Dahlmann. Historians of the study, he declared, were common, 
historians of life were rare. As the Year of Revolution approached 
he joined in the demand for national unity and a constitution 
for every State. He wrote on the Schleswig-Holstein question, 
assisted Gervinus with the Deutsche Zeitung, and entered the 
Baden Parliament, where his eloquence made him a prominent 
figure. At Erfurt he declared that Prussia was the nucleus 
on which the crystal of the German State must grow. In a 
biography of his friend List he emphasised his endeavours for a 
fuller and more virile national life. 

Hausser's main occupation from 1850 to his early death in 
1867 was the history of Germany during the revolutionary and 
Napoleonic wars. No detailed German narrative of that moment- 
ous generation existed, and in the South the French version of the 
time, recently confirmed by Thiers, was still dominant. That 
a Baden Professor should come forward with a warm tribute to 
Prussia's services to the fatherland in the hour of trial was an 
event in the world of politics as well as of historical study. The 
work appeared between 1854 and 1857, and was eagerly welcomed 
throughout the country. The author lived to issue a second 
and third edition, enriching his pages with a mass of new material. 
He begins with a rapid sketch of the Empire from the peace of 
Westphalia, with special reference to Prussia. He expressed a 
warm admiration for the Great Elector and Frederick William I, 
and hails Frederick the Great as a new model of kingship. The 
narrative proper begins with the accession of Frederick William II, 
who is treated with marked severity. He defends the peace of 
Basel and draws Thugut in the darkest colours. The period of 
revival is described in a spirit of militant patriotism. The 
apostasy of Johannes Muller is castigated, Fichte and Arndt are 
exalted, and the heroic story of Hofer is told in full. The fourth 
volume deals with the Liberation, from Leipzig to Waterloo. 
Napoleon is the incarnation of foreign domination, Stein the 
deliverer. The whole work is, above all, a study in diplomatic 
relations. Little attention is devoted to internal reforms, and 
the references to literature and opinion are few and meagre. It 
is a work of exhortation, a psean to the statesmen and soldiers 
of Prussia, an emphatic warning against the seductions of French 
ideas. 

Hausser, declared Treitschke in his preface to the fourth 
edition, made no attempt to write for specialists. ' His aim was 
higher. After French scholarship had long dominated our 



THE PRUSSIAN SCHOOL 133 

historical judgment, he first taught us to look at the Wars of CHAP. 
Liberation with German eyes. ' Indeed, it was as much a political VIII 
as a scientific achievement. No work did more to awake the 
political consciousness of the German people ; but it possessed no 
intrinsic qualities capable of prolonging its authority. Treitsch- 
ke's first volume was to provide a briefer but far more brilliant 
study of the period, and more recently Heigel has traversed the 
ground, paying special recognition to the movement of ideas, 
which Hausser almost entirely neglected. His influence was 
exerted not only by his books but by his lectures. His course on 
German history was attended by the townspeople of Heidelberg, 
by officials and princes ; and among his hearers were many who 
were to take an active part in founding the Empire. His chief 
task, declares Wattenbach, was to make good citizens and good 
Germans. His desk was a tribune. He was penetrated with a 
sense of the commanding role which a strong and united Germany 
would play in the world, and was convinced that such unity could 
only be achieved through Prussia. Everywhere we feel the man 
of action behind the scholar. In presenting the treaty of Ver- 
sailles to the Baden Chamber Jolly declared with truth that more 
than any other man Hausser had taught the youth of South 
Germany the larger patriotism. 

Another member of the Prussian School at whom we must 
glance before reaching its three greatest figures was Duncker. 1 
Co-operating with Dahlmann, Droysen and other Professors at 
Frankfurt, he declared that the German question was not one of 
freedom but of force. He succeeded Dahlmann at Bonn, and 
acted as political adviser to the Crown Prince Frederick. He 
entered the Prussian Chamber, and supported Bismarck in his 
conflict with Parliament. Appointed Director of the Archives 
at Berlin in 1867, he co-operated in publishing the Acts of the 
Great Elector and the correspondence of Frederick the Great. 
He wrote a number of valuable essays, chief among them a 
massive dissertation on Prussia during the French occupation. 
His writings breathe an almost mystical devotion to the dynasty ; 
and on the death of his bosom friend Droysen he was appointed 
Historiographer of Brandenburg. Though his main achievement 
was the ' History of Antiquity,' we learn from Treitschke that 
he considered his share in the struggles for German unity the 
best work of his life. A less known but not less eager member 
was Adolf Schmidt, 3 who, after the disappointment of 1848-9, 

1 See Hayrn's well-known biography, 1891, and Treitschke's essay 
Aufsatze, vol. iv., 1897. 

- See Landwehr, Zur Erinnerung an A. Schmidt, 1887. 



134 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, delivered lectures at Berlin on the history of the last ten years 
VIII which were followed with breathless attention by students and 
citizens, and which summoned Prussia to accomplish the unity of 
the fatherland. In ' Prussia's German Policy,' and in his ' History 
of Attempts at Union since Frederick the Great,' he reviewed 
the critical events of modern Prussian history. ' The proper task 
of history,' he declared, ' is to forget nothing. It must stand as a 
watchful consciousness, a warning memory, and not turn shyly 
away from the present.' The object of the surveys was to show 
that Prussia had always wished for unity. A few years later he 
wrote a pamphlet, ' Alsace and Lorraine, how they were lost,' 
and in 1864 reviewed the historical position of Schleswig-Holstein. 
He succeeded Droysen at Jena, and after the war sat in the 
Reichstag. Had Schmidt devoted his whole life to German 
history instead of stealing hours from other studies, he would 
have been one of the most influential members of the school. 



II 

The eldest of the three great figures who made the Prussian 
School celebrated all over the world and profoundly influenced 
German politics was Droysen. 1 Born two years after Jena, the 
son of a military chaplain of Blucher's corps, his first recollection 
was the sound of the guns which announced the entry of the 
Allies into Paris. At Berlin he plunged into Greek history and 
literature, and his first important achievement was a brilliant 
translation of .Eschylus, followed by a rendering of Aristophanes 
which ranks with Voss' Homer and Schlegel's Shakespeare. While 
still at the University he determined to write a life of Alexander 
the Great, which he published in 1833. The volumes on Hellen- 
ism which followed won him a solid reputation. Unlike most 
historians of Greece, he believed that she deserved her fate because 
she could not secure unity or power. When appointed Extra- 
ordinary Professor of Ancient History and Classical Philology 
at Berlin in 1836, it appeared as if he would dedicate himself 
wholly to antiquity ; but a call to Kiel in 1840 altered the 
whole current of his life. 

The lectures on the Era of the Wars of Liberation, delivered 

1 Gustav Droysen's full-length biography of his father, 1910, only 
reaches to 1848. The best brief surveys are by Hintze, Historische u. 
politische Aufsdtze, vol. iv. (reprinted from Allg. Deutsche Biog.) ; Max 
Duncker, Abhandlungen zur neueren Geschichte, 1887; and Dove, 
Ausgewdhlte Schriftchen, 1898. 



THE PRUSSIAN SCHOOL 135 

in 1842-3, were revised and published in 1846, and mark the CHAP. 
beginning of the change. ' Our youth,' declared the preface, Nlll 
' no longer believes in the deeds of prowess and the enthusiasm 
of that age. My object is to express and justify the love of 
and belief in the fatherland.' His pages pulse with youthful 
fire and emotion. He shows that the characteristic of the era, 
expressing itself equally in the New and the Old World, was the 
revolt against absolute monarchy and aristocracy. ' Our faith 
gives us the assurance that God's hand guides events, both great 
and small ; and the science of history has no higher task than to 
justify this faith.' The divine plan was the association of the 
people in the life of the State. Napoleon was defeated by the 
Prussian people. Thus the American revolt, the French Revolu- 
tion and the uprising of Prussia were three connected steps to- 
wards liberty and nationality. They had been followed by reaction 
and stagnation, and the fourth step was still to take. After this 
preliminary survey he turns to a detailed investigation of the 
period. He shows that the modern State began with the Reforma- 
tion and reached its model in Louis XIV. Frederick the Great 
introduced a new conception of monarchy ; but the State was 
still only a machine. Old Europe was rotten, and Rousseau was 
right to attack the evils of government and society. The revolt 
of the American colonies was the dawn of a brighter day. Droysen 
sympathises with the Revolution, and praises the character and 
work of the French. The war of 1792, he declares, was defensive, 
and he pronounces the murder of Poland a far greater crime than 
the death of Louis XVI. The Revolution conquered the distinc- 
tion between the People and the State, and Mirabeau rightly 
foretold that it would make its way round the world. A detailed 
account of the reforms of Stein and the growth of German 
patriotism leads up to the wars of liberation. The lines are large 
and bold, and he was never again to achieve such richness of 
colouring. The text of the book is rather liberty than nationality. 
Frederick William IV accepted a copy of the first volume, but 
returned the second on account of the pages on the Holy Alliance 
and the disrespect to his father. If the specific message of the 
Prussian School — German unity under the Hohenzollerns — is 
not yet delivered, the call to action, the identification of history 
with politics and the glorification of Prussian statesmen and 
soldiers indicate the road along which the author had begun to 
travel. 

When Denmark attempted to tighten her hold on the duchies 
Droysen issued a pamphlet urging them not to sever their 
fortunes from Germany. He was sent to Frankfurt by the 



136 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. Provisional Government to secure recognition ; and among the 
VIII many Professors who gathered in the Paulskirche none delivered 
his message in more ringing tones. Germany, he declared, must 
rally round Prussia. To the Hohenzollerns belonged the place 
vacant since the fall of the Hohenstaufen. In his greatest 
pamphlet, the 'Memorial of a Schleswig-Holsteiner,' he declared 
that Prussia must not content herself any longer with being the 
second Power in Germany. This vigorous declaration, which 
ranks with Treitschke's most eloquent utterances, was greatly 
admired by Bismarck ; and though coldly received by the King 
it was believed to have won the approval of the Prince of Prussia. 
He devoted the remainder of his life to the problem which the 
Frankfurt Parliament had tried to solve. The ' Life of York ' 
was designed to remind the German people of the sacrifices and 
triumphs of their fathers. The three volumes of this classic 
biography are primarily a study of the wars of liberation grouped 
round the personality of one of its greatest figures. He was 
allowed to use the archives of the General Staff ; and he obtained 
precious information from Schon, the sole survivor of the heroic 
age. Their correspondence 1 reveals his lively interest in the 
work ; but the historian soon found himself forming a different 
opinion of York. While Droysen's verdict is on the whole 
favourable, Schon declared that there was no trace of the hero 
in him and that he was merely lucky. He hailed the first 
volume as excellent ; but as the work advanced the differences 
became acute, and he finally dismissed it as a bad novel. The 
publication of Schon's papers in 1875 was to show how passionate 
was his temper and how treacherous his memory ; and the reputa- 
tion of Droysen's book survived the displeasure of his critic. It 
mattered little to its readers if the old soldier received rather 
more than his due ; for the work was above all a military narrative, 
an arresting picture of an heroic chapter in the life of the German 
people. It breathes an atmosphere of moral exhilaration which 
came like a refreshing breeze in the dark days of Olmiitz, and its 
lively style and narrative power secured it hosts of readers out- 
side professional circles. 

When Droysen's politics had made his position in Kiel im- 
possible, he found refuge at Jena, where he began the principal 
task of his life. Though the first attempt to create a German 
Empire had failed, he never doubted that it would come as soon 
as Prussia woke up to her duty. For the moment she appeared to 
have forgotten her mission ; and it was the aim of the ' History 
of Prussian Policy ' to remind her of it. History was to bear 
1 See Schon, Briefwechsel mil Pertz u. Drovsen, 1896. 



THE PRUSSIAN SCHOOL 137 

witness that the Hohenzollerns alone, from their unswerving CHAP. 
fidelity to German interests as a whole, were fitted to restore VIII 
the Empire. The story opens with the granting of the Mark to 
Frederick of Hohenzollern by the Emperor Sigismund. The 
first volume ranges over a wide field, embracing the Councils of 
Constance and Basel and the Hussite wars. The second depicts 
the chaos of the Empire under the Emperor Frederick, the settle- 
ment of the Mark and the personality of Albert Achilles. With 
the Reformation, of which he is an ardent champion, the pace 
quickens, as the role of Brandenburg was secondary ; but room 
is found for a full-length picture of the Elector Joachim. In these 
early volumes some attention is paid to the inner conditions ; but 
with the Great Elector, who is reached in the fourth volume, the 
material becomes so abundant that the historian virtually limits 
himself to foreign policy. Promotion to Berlin in 1859 rendered 
it easier to consult the archives. The investigation of the reign 
was facilitated by the official publication of the secrets of many 
archives, a vast enterprise in which Droysen himself took part. 
Penetrated with the mission of Prussia, he had attempted with 
scanty success to trace it back to the entry of the Hohenzollerns 
into the Mark. But with the Great Elector the German Idea 
becomes visible, even if it was not the lodestar of Prussian policy. 
The ' territorial time ' ended and the Prussian State began. 

After such a full-blooded personality, Frederick I is an anaemic 
figure. As literature and art are outside the scope of the book, 
the reign presents comparatively little material ; and its main 
achievement, the securing of the crown, provokes disgust at the 
obsequiousness to Austria. Very different is the estimate of 
Frederick William I, to whom three volumes are devoted. With 
scanty courtesy to Ranke, Droysen declares that only his relations 
with his son had been thoroughly studied, and that he had been 
so caricatured that it was necessary to investigate his domestic 
as well as his foreign policy. He would reveal him as the cham- 
pion of the peasants, the founder of the incomparable Prussian 
bureaucracy, the creator of a disciplined army. Droysen's 
detailed study confirmed in essentials the portrait which Ranke 
had drawn. The closing volumes were devoted to Frederick 
the Great, in the publication of whose correspondence and State 
Papers he co-operated. A full discussion of the claim to Silesia 
leads to a verdict in his favour ; and the royal sceptic would 
have read the apologia of his highly moral champion with a 
smile. The last volume, which appeared after his death in 1886, 
covered the years of peace. 

The ' History of Prussian Policy,' representing the heroic 



138 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, labours of over thirty years, ranks among the greatest achieve- 
VIII ments of German scholarship. Few works rest so largely on the 
study of manuscripts, and few contain so much new material. 
Except for the Great Elector, where the harvest was gathered by 
other hands, he only used Prussian archives. He defended him- 
self on the ground that, as they were too vast for a single life to 
cover, it was impossible to consult others. He added that it was 
his task to explain Prussian policy from the standpoint of its 
authors. But history seen exclusively through Prussian spectacles 
was bound to be one-sided • and Droysen read into his sources 
what was not there. The main fault of the book is that it pre- 
dates modern political conceptions. ' The four hundred years 
revealed a regularity of growth and a definiteness of tendency 
which find their expression rather than their cause in the rulers. 
What has founded and maintains and directs this State is, if I 
may say so, an historical necessity. In this national calling it 
finds its justification and strength.' He paints the early Hohen- 
zollerns as loyal to Germany, nationalist, working for the reform 
of the Empire till they saw that the first need was for the reforma- 
tion of the Church. With the Reformation Protestantism became 
part of the national idea, and Austria ceased to share the growing 
intellectual life of Germany. Since 1555 the centre of gravity 
was to be found in the territories, not in the Empire. The Thirty 
Years' War revealed the bankruptcy of the old system. With 
Austria Catholic and cosmopolitan, Prussia became the only 
possible head of a German nation. He did not exaggerate the 
powerlessness of Austria to regenerate Germany ; but his 
interpretation of Prussian policy in terms of nationalism was a 
fundamental error. 

The sharpest criticism came from the Guelf historian Klopp. 1 
The conception of dualism, he declared, was radically false, as 
till 1740 the Hohenzollerns were loyal to the Empire — indeed 
more loyal than any other dynasty. Frederick the Great broke 
with the Hapsburgs in the interests of Prussia, not of Germany. 
Klopp was a political enemy ; but Droysen's contention was 
equally rejected by members of his own school. No competent 
historian accepted his interpretation of the early Electors ; and 
his distinguished pupil Erdmannsdorffer denied the originality 
of the Great Elector, maintaining that he was influenced by 
his counsellors, above all by Waldeck, who was the first to recog- 
nise the national vocation of the Prussian State. The picture of 
Frederick the Great carried little more conviction, even Sybel 
declaring that his attacks on Austria were in no way determined 
1 Kleindeutsche Geschichtsbaumeister, chap. 3, 1861. 



THE PRUSSIAN SCHOOL 139 

by national preoccupations. His greatest pupil, Koser, though CHAP. 
admiring the great King as much as his master, knows nothing of a v m 
German mission. Prutz, the most recent historian of Prussia, 
sharply rejects his reading of Hohenzollern aims. In revising 
his Prussian History in 1874 Ranke ignored the new gospel, 
remaining fair and almost indulgent to Austria, and cool to the 
Hohenzollern heroes. The ' History of Prussian Policy ' was 
not intended to be a rounded work of art, but a storehouse of 
material and a patriotic act. Yet it is curious that he should 
have made so little effort to give literary form to his results. He 
had shown that he could write attractively if he chose ; but in 
his chief work he had no other ambition but to convey the results 
of his research. Again, he scarcely ever halts to summarise his 
results, to analyse tendencies, or to sketch the personality 
of a ruler. Even Ranke groaned at the prospect of having to 
read the book. Professional students dare not neglect the most 
exhaustive survey of the foreign policy of a Great Power ever 
written ; but most readers will be content to assimilate his 
established results in the lighter pages of his successors. 

After the struggle of 1848-9 Droysen never again engaged in 
active politics ; but he watched the realisation of his lifelong 
ideals with rapture. His time was fully occupied by his writings 
and professional duties. We owe a singularly vivid picture of his 
teaching to Fredericq, the distinguished Belgian Professor. ' He 
began low, like a great preacher, to obtain complete silence, and 
you could hear a pin drop. He revealed a profound sadness at 
the falsities that passed under the name of history, often sighing 
with anger and contempt. Every moment there came a biting 
jest. There was great originality and much verve. The lecture 
ended with Homeric laughter at some anecdote told with irresist- 
ible humour. I never attended such an entertaining course, 
and rarely heard such serious and solid stuff.' The lectures to 
which he devoted most thought were those on methodology, notes 
for which he published in 1858, and which passed through many 
editions. He had sat at Hegel's feet, and the leading conception 
of the ' History of Prussian Policy ' — the national idea working 
itself out through the centuries over the heads of men — was 
thoroughly Hegelian. But there is still more of Hegel in the 
Hislorik, 1 which is so condensed that some of its aphorisms are 
scarcely intelligible. Though recognising the immense power 
of ideas, he emphasises free will and the responsibility of the 
individual. ' History is not the light and the truth, but a search 

1 There is an American translation, with a sketch by his pupil Kriiger, 
Droysen's Principles of History, 1893. 



140 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, therefor, a sermon thereon, a consecration thereto. It is the 
VIII moral world regarded in its evolution and growth. Beginning 
and end are hidden from us ; but we can detect the direction of 
the stream. From history we learn to understand God, and we 
can only understand history in God.' Passing to the world of 
reality, he emphasises the power and majesty of the State. ■ The 
State is not the sum of the individuals whom it comprehends, nor 
does it arise from their will. Authority is the essence of its life, 
as love in the family, faith in the Church, and gravity in the 
world of matter.' The work ends on a practical note. ' Historical 
study is the basis for political improvement and culture. The 
statesman is the historian in practice.' 



Ill 

The year of revolutions which decided the destiny of Droysen 
was also of decisive importance in the career of Sybel, 1 who had 
been for some time drifting steadily away from Ranke's moor- 
ings. In his famous preface the master had disclaimed any desire 
to instruct the present from the past ; but that was precisely what 
the pupil was becoming ever more determined to do. In an 
address in 1847 on Universities in relation to political life, he 
urged them to revive the spirit of the wars of liberation. ' The 
true academic policy is to penetrate every study with interest in 
public affairs and to keep in view its value for national concerns. ' 
In 1848 he entered the Hessian Chamber and took part in the 
Vor-Parlament at Frankfurt ; and his experiences strengthened 
his determination to extract and apply the lessons of the past. 
The final renunciation of allegiance took place in 1856 in his 
celebrated address on the position of historiography. Ranke's 
all-round receptivity, he declared, sometimes ran the risk of 
weakening the ethical severity which the perfect historian needed. 
The beginnings of a better way had been shown by Mommsen. 
Despite this outspoken attack, the affectionate relations of the 
two men were in no way disturbed. In dedicating the third 
volume of his ' History of the French Revolution ' to ' my 
revered teacher and fatherly friend,' he said, ' I desire to take 
the opportunity of again confessing myself as your pupil.' 

1 See the excellent biography by Varrentrapp in Sybel' s Vovtvage w 
Abhandlungen, 1897. Among brief appreciations the best are by Schmoller' 
Rede auf Sybel u. Treitschke, 1896 ; Bailleu's articles, Deutsche Rundschau, 
Oct. 1895, and Allg. Deutsche Biog., and Marcks, Manner u. Zeiten, vol. i., 
1911. Guilland ; s chapter in L' Allemagne nouvelle et ses historiens, 1899, is 
hostile but powerful. 



THE PRUSSIAN SCHOOL 141 

No feature of the upheaval of 1848 impressed Sybel more CHAP, 
than the number and zeal of the Socialists, and he determined VIII 
to write a brochure on Communism in the French Revolution. 
But, once transported into that land of marvels, he could not so 
easily escape. The pamphlet grew into five volumes and claimed 
the greater part of thirty years. The first instalment appeared 
in 1853, and was immediately welcomed as one of the most 
important works of the time. The Revolution was known in 
Germany chiefly through the sketch of Dahlmann and the trans- 
lation of Mignet, neither of which rested on original study. The 
pupil of Ranke at once saw the necessity of reaching the sources. 
At Berlin, though not allowed to see the despatches of the Prussian 
minister at Paris, he was permitted to use the archives of the 
War Office. On a visit to Paris in 185 1 he found rich treasures 
in the War Office and the National Archives, where he noticed 
the acts of the Committee of Public Safety. ' What dust,' 
remarked the historian. ' Respect it,' answered the librarian ; 
'it is the dust of 1795.' l He also found useful material at 
the Hague. The Prussian, British, and Austrian archives were 
freely opened to him in time for subsequent editions. Finally, 
in 1866, Madame Cornu persuaded Napoleon to allow him to 
explore the Foreign Office. Sybel's pages thus presented to 
the world the first authentic picture of important aspects of 
the Revolution. 

As a young man he had learned to love Burke, and had 
written an essay on his view of the Revolution before becoming 
its historian. Though a convinced champion of constitutional 
government and sympathising with the emergence of the Third 
Estate, he shared Burke's horror of Jacobinism. Unfettered 
liberty of the individual led to anarchy, mechanical equality to the 
destruction of freedom, the sovereignty of the people to mob-rule 
or a military dictator. His ideal was a strong government 
resting on the middle class, and his ambition was to convince 
German Liberals that French liberty was poison. While Dahl- 
mann had depicted the Revolution as a constitutional struggle, 
Sybel pronounced it above all a social upheaval. He boldly 
challenged the popular distinction between 1789 and 1793, and 
directed attention to the tyranny and anarchy of the opening 
months. He denied that the declaration of Pilnitz constituted 
an attack. The sole authors of the war were the Girondins, led 
by Brissot ; for the Powers of central and eastern Europe were 
more interested in Poland than in the domestic controversies 
of France. 

1 See his ' Pariser Studien ' in Vortrage u. Abhandlungen, 1897. 



142 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. The work was hailed with enthusiasm in Germany. Hausser 

VIII classed it with Mommsen and Droysen, and declared that its 
wealth of material and novelty of view would mark an epoch. 
Freytag proclaimed its importance for the political education of 
the nation. Moriz Ritter found in it a happy combination of the 
methods of Ranke and Niebuhr, the former in the connection of 
outer and inner events, the latter in the emphasis on economic and 
social conditions. Its merits were indeed considerable. Making 
no attempt to describe the dramatic scenes which were already 
familiar, he investigated the development of parties and policy. 
His research in foreign archives first revealed the diplomacy 
of the European rulers with whom the Revolution came in 
collision ; and the most brilliant achievement of the book was 
to establish the connection of eastern and western Europe, and to 
exhibit the Revolution as part of the process of the destruction 
of old Europe. In the words of Acton, he stands aloof from the 
meridian of Paris. Its continuation to the year 1801 enabled him 
to throw light on the little-known period between the Revolu- 
tion and the Consulate. Revised up to 1880, it incorporated the 
scholarship of a generation. Yet the work was also disfigured 
by grave faults. It was in fact, if not in intention, a polemic. 
' It is an attack,' declares Guilland, ' not only on the Revolution 
but on the mind and history of France.' The moral of the book 
is the utter political incapacity of the French. In his desire 
to disperse for ever the halo of heroism attaching to the Revolu- 
tion, he turns the giants into pygmies. The gospel of liberty and 
equality appears to him an appeal to greed and passion, not a 
demand for justice. Like Taine he accumulates the evidences 
of excess, and overlooks the durable work of the Convention. He 
has no word of appreciation for the heroism of the Volunteers. 
He utterly fails to recognise the generous emotions of a people, 
to allow for the staggering difficulties of their task, to admit the 
ceaseless intrigues of the Court. He rashly declares that Marie 
Antoinette was ready to work constitutional monarchy, and that, 
if restored, the fall of feudalism would have been recognised. 
His exclusive attribution of the war to the Girondins was rejected 
by Ranke. He was almost equally hostile to Austria, and Thugut 
is the scapegoat of the Coalition. Leopold, he declared, was 
guiltless of the outbreak of the war ; but Austria was mainly 
responsible for its unhappy course, and the treaty of Campo 
Formio was a betrayal. Vivenot sharply attacked the traducer 
of the Hapsburgs ; and Huffer, a Westphalian Catholic and for a 
time Sybel's colleague at Bonn, based a very different story on a 
more exhaustive study of the archives. Beside the madness 



THE PRUSSIAN SCHOOL 143 

of France, the greed of Russia and the selfishness of Austria, CHAP. 
Prussia stands out as the model State. VIII 

Sybel's famous work is not only disfigured by political and 
dynastic bias, but is a purely external narrative. ' You will 
have a notion of things,' remarks Sorel, ' but you will not see 
the men. You know what the Prussian Ministry and the Vien- 
nese Cabinet have done or tried to do, but the peoples, their 
passions, their characters remain in shadow.' We witness 
rather a conflict of diplomatists than the birth of a new world. 
His book dwarfs the Revolution not less than the actors in the 
drama, for it was only one of the three expressions of the end of 
the old regime, ranking with the destruction of Poland and the 
fall of the Holy Roman Empire. ' These three events are con- 
nected, for their foundation is the same. In each it is the Middle 
Ages which are crumbling away. Everywhere a new policy 
triumphs, the modern military monarchy, levelling and central- 
ising.' His mistake was in not recognising more frankly that the 
initiation was French, and that the Revolution was by far the 
most important event in European history since the Reformation. 
Frederic Harrison's verdict, ' little more than a German Alison, 
the laborious tirade of a wrong-headed partisan,' does injustice 
to its learning and power ; but though it is a book which no 
student of the revolutionary era dare neglect, few of its readers 
are likely to share its standpoint or to adopt its interpretation. 

Sybel's dislike of France and Austria was equalled by his 
distaste for Catholicism, which he regarded as at once an anti- 
national influence and an enemy of free research. To be an 
Ultramontane and a German patriot, he declared in an early 
essay, was impossible. ' One cannot serve two masters at the 
same time, the Pope and the King ; and a choice must be made.' 
To invite such a man to Munich was a bold experiment ; but 
Maximilian was determined to create an historical school, and 
Ranke urged his old pupil to accept. Sybel entered eagerly into 
the King's plans and became one of the favourites of the Round 
Table. He aided Ranke in the foundation of the Historical 
Commission and became its first secretary. But his most im- 
portant achievement at Munich was the creation of the Historische 
Zeitschrift. ' We want an organ,' he wrote to Waitz in 1857, 
' to represent a definite scientific tendency and method. Every 
year history takes more and more the place of philosophy.' 
In his Introduction to the first number he described it as inde- 
pendent and scientific ; but it took its character from the Editor, 
who ruled out feudalism, which wished to revive dead elements, 
radicalism, which replaced organic revolution by caprice, and 



144 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. Ultraraontanism, which subjected national development to 

VIII foreign control. Oldenbourg, the publisher, writing after the 

historian's death in 1895, described him as an ideal editor, quick, 

tranquil and firm. 1 In later years he handed over most of the 

detail to younger men, retaining only the general control. 

As Sybel lost no opportunity at Munich of giving expression 
to his views by pen and tongue, the prejudice against the north- 
erner naturally increased. ' I am four-sevenths politician and 
three-sevenths professor,' he candidly confessed to Bluntschli. 
The King told him that he did not wish him to go, but could not 
defend him if an agitation arose. He therefore seized the oppor- 
tunity of a vacancy at Bonn, caused by the death of Dahlmann, to 
withdraw from a difficult position. He celebrated his arrival 
by the publication of his reply to Ficker, ' The German Nation 
and the Empire,' in which he declared that, as Prussia had shown 
herself the true leader of Germany, Austria must go. ' As sure 
as the stream flows forward, Germany will form a close union 
under the lead of its strongest member.' He was, however, one 
of the most determined of Bismarck's opponents in the years of 
conflict. He entered the Prussian Landtag and with Gneist 
and Virchow led the opposition to the Government, desiring to 
refuse supplies for the war of 1864. But Sadowa effected a 
sudden and permanent conversion. While Mommsen and Virchow 
remained in the old camp, Sybel became one of the founders and 
leaders of the National Liberals. The Minister who had lately 
scoffed at the Professors for believing that they could unite 
Germany by talk about liberty quickly recognised the value of 
their support, and on the jubilee of Sybel's doctorate publicly 
expressed his gratitude for his ' long co-operation in common 
work for the fatherland.' No German greeted the stupendous 
events of 1870 with greater thankfulness. ' What have we done,' 
he cried, ' that God's grace should allow us to witness such 
mighty things ? ' Like Ranke, however, he was soon dismayed 
by the growth of socialism and materialism, and was so alarmed 
by the growth of the Centrum that he re-entered the Landtag in 
order to support the Government in the Kulturkampf. 

In 1875 Sybel was appointed Director of the Prussian Archives. 
He inaugurated the great series of 'Publications from the Archives' 
which is still in progress, advised the Berlin Academy to publish 
the Political Correspondence of Frederick the Great, and per- 
suaded the Government to found an Historical Institute in Rome 
when Leo XIII threw open the Vatican archives. But the 

1 See hi,s article in Historische Zeitschrift, 1895. 



THE PRUSSIAN SCHOOL 145 

main task of his closing years was to describe the founding of CHAP, 
the German Empire. The suggestion came from Bismarck, who V HI 
promised him the use of the archives. After relating the fall of 
the Holy Roman Empire, he remarked no plan could appeal to 
him more than the resurrection of the German Empire. His 
second great work was written far more rapidly than the first. 
He had taken an active part in many of the events, and the only 
archives that he was able to consult lay ready to his hand. He 
aimed at a plain narrative of the diplomatic and military efforts 
of Prussia. The first five volumes appeared in 1889 ; the sixth 
and seventh, bringing the story to the declaration of war by 
Napoleon III, in 1894. A year later he was dead. 

' I have nowhere sought to hide my Prussian and National 
Liberal opinions,' he wrote in the preface. Yet the work is far 
less polemical than the ' History of the French Revolution.' 
Beginning with a rapid sketch of modern German history, the 
narrative broadens in 1848 and becomes detailed with Bismarck's 
accession to power in 1862. William I is reverently painted. 
' His faith was the bread of his life, the consolation of his grief, 
the unique rule of his actions.' Rossler, however, wittily 
remarked that in the title, ' The Founding of the German Empire 
by William I,' there was a misprint, and that it should run ' in 
spite of ' instead of ' by.' (Trotz for durch.) But though Bis- 
marck is the hero of his drama, he fails to convey a realistic 
impression of the Iron Chancellor. He is too correct, too colour- 
less, too tame. A. critic complained that he had transformed the 
tiger into a tame cat. He devotes many hundred pages to the 
diplomatic crises which preceded the wars of 1864, 1866 and 1870, 
and in each case attributes the responsibility to the enemy. He 
conveys no impression of the double-dealing in the Schleswig- 
Holstein problem, omits to state how Bismarck goaded his 
master to war in 1866, and conceals the mission of Lothar Bucher 
to Madrid. The Ems telegram was shortened, not altered. Prussian 
policy is throughout irreproachably loyal and correct, and Bis- 
marck is always in Sunday clothes. The work was an apologia, 
anticipating the Reflections which were to appear after the states- 
man's death. Such virtue has been claimed for the founder of the 
German Empire by no other writer, and the Memoirs of the King 
of Roumania have revealed the whole story of his brother's 
candidature for the Spanish throne. The best antidote to this 
voluminous eulogy is Busch's diary. Yet, though he maintains 
that Bismarck had no wish for war, he cannot regret the out- 
break of the conflict which realised the dream of his life. ' He 
who has had the happiness to live through these first days of the 



146 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, national resurrection will retain their memory as a holy possession 
VIII for ever. ' He entertains no unfriendly feelings towards Napoleon, 
whom he describes as by nature a man of peace, who loved to 
think and to dream. In some addenda i written shortly before 
his death he also exculpated the Empress Eugenie. The real 
culprit was Gramont. 

The book met with a mixed reception. The clearness of 
arrangement and skill in unravelling the threads of complicated 
diplomatic situations were unreservedly praised. Meinecke spoke 
of the wonderfully beautiful consummation of his lifework. ' All 
his ideas are able to combine in tranquil harmony — the strong, 
national State with its roots in history, the free constitutional 
life resting on the real forces of the nation, the conquering person- 
ality of the statesman, the dominance of ethical laws in history.' 
Such enthusiasm was misplaced. It is decidedly inferior in 
learning, power, and originality to the ' History of the French 
Revolution.' Some complained that it was too official, omitting 
the conflicts of Bismarck with the Court, others that it was too 
exclusively diplomatic. Internal politics were neglected before 
1866. Those who expected sensational revelations from the 
archives were disappointed. Though he had known all the leading 
actors in the drama, he failed to make the scenes live. The picture 
lacks atmosphere and background. Among his critics was the 
young Emperor, who was angered by the subordinate role 
attributed to his grandfather. When the Verdun prize was 
assigned to Sybel he vetoed the award, and on the fall of Bis- 
marck excluded the historian from the archives of the Foreign 
Ofhce. The aid of Bismarck and the diaries of other leading 
actors enabled him to complete his journey ; but the later 
volumes are of less value. Though Ottokar Lorenz has devoted 
a large volume to magnifying the role of William I, his estimate 
of Bismarck's share in the great transformation has never been 
overthrown. His work remains of value as the official statement 
of the Prussian case ; but it has to be checked at every point by 
the testimony of other witnesses. Friedjung has given the 
Austrian side of the story, and La Gorce has stated the case of 
France. 

It will be long before Sybel's two chief works cease to be 
consulted ; but they have never become widely popular. They 
are full of information, but are disfigured by strong prejudices. 
He went through life waving the Prussian banner and waging 
truceless war against France, Austria and the Roman Church. 
History was a vast arsenal which furnished him with weapons of 
1 Published in Hisiorische Zeitschrift, vol. lxxv. 



THE PRUSSIAN SCHOOL 147 

attack and defence. Moreover, he lacked the magic of style. We CHAP, 
miss the monumental serenity of Ranke and the warmth and VIII 
colour of Treitschke. There is no trace of genius in Sybel or 
his writings. He possessed a positive, solid, powerful mind, 
but lacked imagination and subtlety. Some of his friends con- 
sidered that he was fashioned rather for the forum than the 
library. In truth he belongs as much to the history of Germany 
as to the annals of scholarship. He was the leader of the brilliant 
group of historians who harnessed their studies to their politics 
and played a decisive part in preparing their countrymen for the 
momentous changes which culminated in 1870. 



IV 

The youngest, the greatest and the last of the Prussian 
School was among the most striking personalities of the century. 
As Hutten's name stands among writers for the revolt against 
the Pope and Korner's for the uprising against Napoleon, so 
Treitschke 1 represents the ascent of Germany from the paralysis 
of the Bund to the glories of 1870. The most eloquent of 
preachers, the most fervid of apostles, the most passionate of 
partisans, he most completely embodies the blending of history 
and politics which it was the aim of the School to achieve. 
The most fiery champion of Prussian claims was a Saxon of 
Czech descent. But for a grave illness in childhood, resulting 
in almost total deafness, he would have followed his father's pro- 
fession and entered the army ; and his sympathies were always 
with action. At sixteen the precocious schoolboy gave expression 
to the ideal of German union under Prussia in the presence of 
Beust. His convictions were strengthened at Bonn, where he 
attended the lectures of Arndt, now aged eighty-three, ' not to 
learn anything, but to see the hale old man.' But the main in- 
fluence was Dahlmann, who took a keen interest in the brilliant 
young Saxon. ' He told me I must serve my fatherland ; and 
as he gave me his hand with a piercing look, I gained courage 
and became conscious how much I had to do.' It was at this 

1 The fullest biography is by Petersdorff in Allg. Deutsche Biog. 
Schiemarm, Treitschke' s Lehv- u. Wander jahre, 1896, only extends to 1867. 
The best appreciation is by Marcks, Treitschke, Ein Gedenkblatt, 1905. For 
his personality see Hausrath's vivid volume, Zur Erinnerung an Trei schke, 
1 901. Among shorter appreciations the best are Schmoller, Rede auf Sybel 
u. Treitschke, 1896 ; Bailleu, Deutsche Rundschau, Oct. -Nov. 1896 ; 
Headlam, in English Historical Review, 1897. Guilland's chapter in 
L'Allemagne nouvelle et ses hisloriens, 1899, is violently hostile. 

l 2 



148 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, time that he deeply pondered Pertz' massive biography of Stein. 
VIII ' I cannot express how the study of this mighty man delights 
and elevates me. He only thought of his duty, like the hum- 
blest official.' He finished his University career at Heidelberg, 
where he heard Hausser proclaim the same doctrine that he had 
learned from Dahlmann. 

He had read widely in history and literature as well as in 
political science, but his first publication was a little volume of 
Patriotic Poems. He had written verse since the age of nine, and 
some of the pieces show real poetical talent. The veteran Arndt 
spoke warmly of the verses, but they were not widely noticed 
and were never reprinted. A second volume, published in 1857, 
attracted no more attention. His first appearance as a publicist 
was in his dissertation on the Science of Society, which, in 
opposition to Riehl and other thinkers, he asserted to have no 
existence. The only science was that of the State, which was 
society organised as a unity. The State, he added, was necessary 
and primeval, and no contract was needed to create or maintain 
it. One day, he concluded, the German State would fulfil its 
destiny, and Prussia was the nucleus round which the broken 
fragments must unite. The same doctrines were more openly 
expressed in the writings by which he now began to become known 
to wider circles. The admirable appreciation of Kleist virtually 
discovered the poet patriot whose fame has steadily advanced 
from that moment. The ' Prince of Homburg ' supplied him with 
the strong meat that he craved, and the essay closes with its 
famous line, ' In Staub mit alien Feinden Brandenburgs.' The 
studies of Otto Ludwig and Hebbel reveal his devotion to drama ; 
those on Milton, Byron, Lessing and Dahlmann give eloquent 
utterance to his enthusiasm for liberty. 

At the age of twenty-five the young scholar delivered lectures 
at Leipzig on German history, to which crowded audiences listened 
as they had listened to Fichte half a century earlier. He taught 
that Prussia could only become a rallying point for all Germans 
as a constitutional State. All that was new and fruitful in the 
nineteenth century, he declared in his essay on Liberty, was the 
work of liberalism. But liberty rested more on a wisely-ordered 
national life and a good administration than on the power of 
Parliaments. England possessed a State, but valued it little. 
Germany lacked it, and therefore was more conscious of its worth. 
He now determined to write a sketch of the Bund from 1815 to 
1848 in order to exhibit the sinful waste of national strength. 
His plan widened into a history of Germany, and the work which 
was expected to be completed in three years filled the remainder of 



THE PRUSSIAN SCHOOL 



149 



his life. ' We need an Emperor,' he cried in his address on Fichte ; CHAP. 
' Austria cannot give us what we want, for she is neither free nor VIII 
German.' A still greater effect was produced by his oration on 
the jubilee of the battle of Leipzig, which echoed through Germany. 
' One thing we still lack — the State. Ours is the only people which 
possesses no general legislation, which can send no representatives 
to the meetings of the Powers. No salvo salutes the German 
flag in a foreign port. Our country sails the sea without colours, 
like a pirate.' He had been profoundly impressed by the ex- 
ample of Italy. What Piedmont had done Prussia could do. 

Treitschke demanded a Germany that should be not only one 
Empire, but one State. Prussia was to annex the smaller States, 
and the princely houses were to disappear. ' Believe me,' he 
wrote to Freytag, ' only the good sword of the conqueror can 
unite these lands with the North.' Such doctrine was little short 
of treason in Saxony, and the outcry became ever louder. Thus 
when Mathy, a native of Baden, procured the offer of a Chair 
at Freiburg in 1863, it was accepted. Baden was at once the 
most national and the most liberal of the smaller States, and its 
ruler was connected with Prussia by marriage. On the other 
hand, the students were mainly Catholic. ' It is a parson's 
town,' he wrote to Freytag. ' The difference between Catholicism 
and Protestantism is much deeper than good people think. It is 
not a difference between certain dogmas, but between slavery and 
intellectual freedom.' The Bishop forbade Catholic students to 
attend his lectures ; but his Protestant hearers enjoyed a rare 
treat. His colleague and lifelong friend Hausrath describes the 
effect of his wonderful eloquence, and remarks that he reminded 
him of a Hussite warrior. The year following his arrival he 
composed his greatest essay, 'Federation and Centralisation,' 
demanding that Prussia should attack the small States. ' My 
father will grieve over it,' he wrote, ' but in these things the 
duties of a son are not the only ones.' Prussia, he declared, had 
done all that was really great in Germany since 1648, and was 
herself the supreme political achievement of the German people. 
Only the Courts desired the existing system to continue, under 
which Germany was a mere geographical expression. The essay 
was an act, and revealed the first political writer of the day. 
Like Sybel, he at first mistrusted Bismarck ; but he soon con- 
vinced himself that the Chancellor was determined to strengthen 
Prussia. The two men met in 1866 on the eve of the war, and 
Bismarck pressed him to accompany the army and write mani- 
festoes, to be rewarded by a Chair at Berlin. The historian refused 
on the ground that he wished to be independent, and that he 



150 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, could not become a Prussian official till the Constitution was 
VIII respected. None the less, when Baden joined Austria, he resigned 
his Chair at Freiburg. ' I long for the North,' he wrote ; ' I belong 
to it with my whole being. ' In the moment of victory he launched 
a flaming pamphlet on the ' Future of the North-German Middle 
States,' demanding the annexation by Prussia of Hanover, Hesse 
and Saxony, ' ripe and over-ripe for annihilation.' It was not 
surprising that his sorely tried father at this point publicly 
repudiated his son's attacks on the King. 

Treitschke succeeded Hausser at Heidelberg in 1867. He was 
now a national figure , but he was regarded as more of a publicist 
than an historian. In sending the first volume of his Essays to 
his father in 1865 he wrote, ' That bloodless objectivity which 
does not say on which side is the narrator's heart is the exact 
opposite of the true historical sense. Judgment is free, even to the 
author.' Almost every essay in this delightful volume carried its 
political message. In the voluminous attack on Bonapartism 
and French Policy, which soon followed, the faults of his method 
outweigh the brilliance of his style. Rulers were of two sorts — 
servants of the State and egoists. Napoleon was a monster, not 
a statesman — a grandiose Attila, a monstrous Genghis Khan, who 
loved war for its own sake. But in truth France was little 
better than her tyrant. Like Sybel, but more offensively and 
with less qualification, he denounces the French as vain and 
turbulent, brave but lacking solidity, unable to perform the 
commonplace duties of life. France was a bad neighbour, 
oscillating between anarchy and despotism. The celebrated 
essay on Cavour is of far higher quality. He wrote best when 
he wrote with sympathy ; and next to Bismarck Cavour was 
his chosen hero. The detailed survey of the history of the 
United Netherlands taught the same lesson of unification. He 
watched the gathering of the storm-clouds in 1870 with feverish 
anxiety. On the outbreak of war he wrote, ' What a humiliation 
we have escaped ! Had not Bismarck so cleverly edited the 
telegram, the King would have given way again. ' His ' Ode of the 
Black Eagle ' was the best war-song of the year. 1 After the decisive 
battles he published a pamphlet, ' What do we ask from France ? ' 
contending that Alsace was German. Like Freytag,he did not 
desire the Imperial title, which he held to smack of Bonapartism. 
Victory, he declared, opened up infinite perspectives for Ger- 
many, who, with her rich moral culture, would become instructress 
of the nations. He was surprised by the ready patriotism of 
the South, which destroyed his scheme of annexation. He feared 
1 Reprinted in Zehn Jahre deutscher Kampfe, 269-71. 



THE PRUSSIAN SCHOOL 151 

that a federation could never be so strong as a unitary State, CHAP, 
but what was good enough for Bismarck he was willing to accept. VIII 
He entered the Reichstag in 1871 as a National Liberal, and took 
an active part in the debates on the Kulturkampf ; but he was 
disappointed with Parliamentary life. ' Of all the institutions of 
our young Empire,' he wrote in 1883, ' none has proved so bad 
as the Reichstag.' 

After the realisation of his dreams Treitschke settled down 
to write the ' History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century ' 
which he had planned ten years before. He accepted a call to 
Berlin in 1874, remarking that as he had to spend half the year 
in the Prussian archives he might as well live there. Ranke had 
not favoured the appointment, regarding him as a publicist, not an 
historian. Other scholars shared his misgivings, and the new Pro- 
fessor was only admitted to the Berlin Academy shortly before 
his death. Yet he was to produce one of the greatest historical 
works of the century. ' I desire to write a history of the Bund,' 
he had announced in 1861, ' to show the idle masses that the 
foundations of political existence, power and liberty, are lacking, 
and that no salvation is possible but by the annihilation of the 
small States.' But with the disappearance of the Bund he re- 
solved to attempt a panoramic view of the men and policy, in- 
stitutions and ideas, which had prepared the way for the new 
Germany. The first volume, published in 1879, surveying the 
revolutionary and Napoleonic period, formed an introduction to 
the detailed narrative. While Hausser had dealt with govern- 
ments, Treitschke grasped the national life as a whole. The 
author of the Patriotic Poems found in poetry the true mirror 
of the national spirit. The backbone of the volume was the 
story of Prussia ; but the emphasis on her providential role was 
not incompatible with considerable severity towards Frederick 
William II. The volume closes with the War of Liberation and 
the Congress of Vienna. Despite its great bulk, it was received 
with enthusiasm and sold by thousands. It quickly came to be 
called the ' Deutsche Geschichte,' as Grimm's masterpiece was 
the ' Deutsche Grammatik,' without the name of the author. 

The second volume, extending to the Carlsbad decrees, deals 
with a far less exciting story, but rests more largely on original 
research. Its opening chapter, filling over a hundred pages, 
surveys the art, literature and scholarship of the Restoration, 
and ranks among the greatest of his achievements. A chapter 
dealing with the reorganisation of Prussia after the war is followed 
by a sketch of the South German States. The latter part of the 
volume describes the struggle between the liberal spirit which 



152 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, spoke through the Universities and the heavy hand of Metternich 
VIII which forced the German princes to do his bidding. A critic 
declared that he should have written a Prussian, not a German 
History, since the Prussian chapters were as good as the others 
were bad. The aggressively Prussian standpoint provoked angry 
criticism. The most formidable attack came from the Strassburg 
Professor, Baumgarten, 1 the distinguished historian of Spain 
and Charles V, who was angered at Treitschke excusing in 
Prussia what he censured in Austria and abusing the more 
liberal ideas of the minor States. His indignation found utter- 
ance in a pamphlet, ' Treitschke's German History,' which created 
a great sensation. His standpoint, declared Baumgarten, was 
defensible before 1870, but not after, and his attacks were more 
calculated to revive than to bury particularism. What Rome 
was to Janssen Prussia was to Treitschke. He could stimulate 
and inspire, but no one dare look to him for instruction. He 
revealed an almost incredible failure to understand non-Prussian 
Germany. He spoke of Frederick William III like a courtier 
and of other rulers like a republican. Admirable in its delineation 
of intellectual life, the book was ruined by its political prejudices. 
A controversy between the historian and his old friend ensued ; 
and Treitschke declared that his critics would have a different 
tale to tell when he reached Frederick William IV. Bulle sup- 
ported Baumgarten ; but Erdmannsdorffer pointed out some 
details in which the critic himself had gone astray, and Sybel 
explained that the ' Deutsche Geschichte ' had attacked not liberal- 
ism but doctrinaire radicalism. Yet the damaging impression left 
by Baumgarten's attack was never effaced, for, though the tone 
was too shrill, he fastened on the fundamental flaw of the work. 
These defects were less noticeable in the third volume, which 
extended to 1830. The story of the Zollverein is commenced, and 
the importance of Motz was for the first time established. The 
gem of the volume is the celebrated chapter on the smaller States 
of North Germany, their rulers, their politics and their culture, 
a marvellous series of skilfully-etched vignettes. The fourth 
volume covers the closing decade of the long reign of Frederick 
William III, and deals mainly with the growth of constitutional 
ideas. The Zollverein is completed, the Austrian influence be- 
comes less oppressive, and Prussia begins to assert her place in 
the national life. The fifth, published in 1894, related the golden 
dawn of Frederick William IV and his brilliant circle. It was the 
most perfect part of the work, and possessed a certain mellow tran- 

1 See Erich Marcks' admirable biography prefixed to his Aufsdtze u. 
Reden, 1894. 



THE PRUSSIAN SCHOOL 153 

quillity. No one could accuse him of painting a courtier's portrait CHAP, 
of the King ; but though he lamented his political infirmities vin 
he seized the nobility of the man, and when he strikes it is more 
in sorrow than in anger. He was now sixty, and his eyesight 
was becoming very weak. He had reached 1847, and was eager 
to embark on the year of revolution. ' God cannot take me 
away,' he said to Bailleu, ' till I have written my sixth volume.' 
But it was not to be. His health rapidly declined, and in 1896 
he died. 

The ' Deutsche Geschichte ' is the nearest Continental equiva- 
lent to Macaulay's History. Both vibrate with their authors' 
personality. Both are distinguished by conspicuous merits and 
defects. Treitschke's book rested throughout on the Prussian 
archives. Before he wrote little was known of Prussian history 
and still less of the minor States between the downfall of Napoleon 
and the Year of Revolutions. But his work was far more than 
a political narrative. It presented an encyclopaedic picture of 
national development. He made a dull period live. He depicted 
the epoch, not as an era of decay, but as a gathering of the forces 
which were to lead to unity and a time of incomparable intel- 
lectual activity. Alone of the Prussian School he embraces 
culture in his vision, and he devotes infinite care to the movement 
of opinion and the course of literature and scholarship. Not less 
notable is his skill with individuals, and he has something of 
Carlyle's power of seizing the lesser as well as the larger traits of 
character. His style is of incomparable richness and power, 
and he is a master of humour and pathos. The slight excess of 
rhetoric in the early essays and addresses has disappeared. He is 
the literary artist of the Prussian School. In the magic of style 
and in throbbing vitality he equals Mommsen and leaves all other 
German historians behind. 

The vivid personality which constitutes one of the main 
charms of the book is also responsible for its main defects. ' I 
grow too easily excited,' he wrote to Sybel in 1864, ' but in time 
I hope to become an historian.' In 1882 he recognised that he 
would never change, confessing that his blood was too hot for 
an historian. His pen was a sword. His colleague Schmoller 
testifies that he loved and hated with elementary, almost volcanic 
force. To Freytag he confessed that the patriot in him was a 
thousand times stronger than the Professor. Friends compared 
him to Hotspur, to the Cid, to Young Siegfried. While Ranke 
was the most objective, Treitschke was the most subjective of 
German historians. ' Only a stout heart,' he wrote, ' which feels 
the joys and sorrows of the fatherland as its own, can give veracity 



154 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, to an historical narrative.' He wrote history less to record than 
VII I to teach. Only the Jesuits beat him, said Bamberger bitterly, 
in the attempt to make instruction serve a special purpose. 
He hurls missiles at Austria, France, Russia and the Jews. He 
condemns England as utilitarian and hypocritical, advancing 
to the conquest of an Empire with the Bible in one hand and an 
opium pipe in the other. By the side of the grasping Englishman 
the German was an idealist. He despises Louis Philippe and 
Leopold of Belgium as bourgeois and commercial Kings. But 
though the Germans are the best of the peoples, they are not 
all of equal merit. Prussia is the chosen nation. By the time 
he wrote his history Treitschke had completely conquered his 
dislike of the Junkers. The Zollverein and the Prussian army 
were the instruments of unity. The nobility, he declares, were 
more far-sighted and self-sacrificing than the bourgeoisie. His 
sharpest arrows are aimed at Young Germany, which he detests 
as Jewish, radical and Francophil. He writes of Heine and 
Borne as the corrupters of youth, the enemies of the Fatherland. 
Treitschke was far too much of a politician not to take part 
in the controversies which arose during the last twenty years of 
his life. Two elements of the new Germany aroused his special 
indignation. He regarded socialism as pure anarchy, declaring 
that it should be met with force, not argument. In a fiery article, 
' Socialism and its Patrons,' he denounced the Professors who went 
halfway to meet it. Schmoller, the most distinguished representa- 
tive of the Socialists of the Chair, issued a dignified reply, con- 
victing the historian of misunderstanding their position. He 
was even more alarmed by the growing influence of the Jews. 
He was dismayed to witness the power in finance and journalism 
of men to whom patriotism and Christianity were nothing. He 
had no wish to reimpose disabilities, and his tone was by no 
means extravagant ; but the utterances of the famous historian 
synchronised with the foundation of anti-semitism by Stocker. 
Among his academic colleagues were Jewish scholars, and 
Mommsen took the lead in organising a reply which accused him 
of destroying Lessing's great heritage of tolerance. 

Treitschke fought his battles over again in his lectures. 
The crowded audiences listened to unmeasured attacks on France 
and England, socialism and the Jews, pacifism and Parliamentary 
Government. The course on Political Science, delivered many 
times throughout his life and published from notes after his 
death, provided the opportunity. His main themes were the 
necessity of a strong State, an executive independent of party 
majorities, and the training of virile citizens. In an early essay 



THE PRUSSIAN SCHOOL 155 

he had sung the praises of war. ' The hope of banishing war CHAP, 
is not only meaningless but immoral. Its disappearance would VIII 
turn the earth into a great temple of selfishness. ' ' Our age is an 
age of iron,' he wrote later ; ' if the strong vanquishes the weak 
it is the law of life.' The duel was a no less indispensable moral 
discipline than war. It was a lamentable end for a man who had 
rendered such services to his country that he should become the 
champion of absolutism and heat the fires of chauvinism by his 
wild and whirling words. Like the Junkers, he hailed the 
accession of William II with rapture ; but the fall of Bismarck 
broke the spell. He attacked Caprivi and his master with so 
little reserve that he was threatened with Sybel's fate of exclusion 
from the archives. In his rich and full-blooded personality noble 
and repulsive elements were intermingled. There was a distinct 
strain of genius in him. He was the Bismarck of the Chair. 

With the death of Treitschke the Prussian School disappeared. 
Its members were the political schoolmasters of Germany at a 
time of discouragement, and braced their countrymen to the 
efforts w hich culminated in the creation of a mighty Empire. 
It had grown out of a national need, and its raison d'etre ceased 
when the need was satisfied. If the purpose of history is to 
stir a nation to action, Droysen, Sybel and Treitschke were among 
the greatest of historians. If its supreme aim is to discover truth 
and to interpret the movement of humanity, they have no claim 
to a place in the first class. The stream of historical studies, 
temporarily deflected by their powerful influence, began to 
return to the channel which Ranke had marked out for it. Moriz 
Ritter had already dedicated his life to the Counter-Reformation 
and the Thirty Years' War. Erdmannsdorffer had drawn the 
first objective portrait of the Great Elector. Koser was at work 
on the biography of Frederick the Great, which is perhaps the most 
perfect work in the field of recent German history. Delbriick had 
devoted himself to Gneisenau, Max Lehmann to Scharnhorst 
and Stein. Riezler was far advanced in his encyclopaedic survey 
of Bavarian history and culture. Among younger men, Erich 
Marcks has written with unfailing judgment of Bismarck and his 
master, and Meinecke has traced the development of political 
opinion from the Revolution to 1848. Lenz, Hintze, Krauske 
and other scholars have devoted themselves to Prussian history. 
The ' Acta Borussica,' published by the Berlin Academy under 
the skilled guidance of Schmoller, have revealed the secrets of 
Prussian internal administration and industry during the 
eighteenth century. We live in an age of smaller achievements, 
but of more assured results. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE RENAISSANCE OF HISTORICAL STUDIES IN FRANCE 

CHAP ^ HE French Revolution constituted as decisive a breach with 
IX tradition in historical scholarship as in Church and State. 1 The 
Jacobin looked on the past as a foul dungeon from which the 
human spirit had only just escaped. The National Assembly 
ordered a holocaust of papers relating to the noble families 
of France in the Place Vendome, and Condorcet delivered a 
discourse suitable to the occasion. ' To-day Reason burns the 
innumerable volumes which attest the vanity of a caste. 
Other vestiges remain in public and private libraries. They 
must be enveloped in a common destruction.' Throughout the 
country deeds were burnt to the accompaniment of pealing 
bells, while the people danced to the cry of Vive la Republique." 
The two groups of historical workers which had made France 
the centre of research for a century were swept away. The 
Benedictines had ceased to produce scholars of the calibre of 
Mabillon and Montfaucon, but much solid and loyal work was 
accomplished. In 1790 Dom Brial 3 wrote to a friend that, despite 
the confusion, Dom Clement was finishing the last sheets of the 
' Art de verifier les dates/ but that all the other works in which 
the Congregations were engaged were suspended. ' Dom Clement, 
he adds, ' is fairly well for his age, but he shares our chagrin at 
events.' Three years later Dom Clement was dead, and the 
curtain falls. The fate of the Congregations was shared by the 
Academies ; but as there was nothing except their royal origin 
to connect them with the old regime, they were quickly revived 

1 For summaries of French scholarship in the nineteenth century see 
Thienot, Rapport sur les Etudes historiques, 1867, and C. Jullian's Intro- 
duction to Extraits des Historiens francais, 1897. 

2 See Despois, Le Vandalisme revolutionnaire, 1868, and Laborde, 
Les Archives de France pendant la Revolution et V Empire, 1867. 

3 Dom Brial, ' Denx Lettres,' in Societe de I'Histoire de France, Notices 
et Documents, 1884. 



HISTORICAL STUDIES IN FRANCE 157 

in a modified form. When the Terror was over, a new body CHAP. 
called the Institute was created, consisting of departments of IX 
science, literature and art, with a new Academy of Moral and 
Political Science. The Institute invited Dom Brial to continue 
Bouquet'scollection of chronicles, to which he had already devoted 
many years. ' Almost alone,' writes the editor in 1801, ' I 
accomplished the thirteenth volume ; and on receiving it from 
me they saw the importance of making use of the Benedictines, 
and are now planning to continue the collection of the historians 
of the Crusades, the ' Gallia Christiana,' and other works. These 
undertakings are still nothing but projects, but they prove that 
we have emerged a little from the state of barbarism in which 
we were plunged.' The promise of the early days of the Consulate 
was deceptive, and France entered on a period of ruthless des- 
potism not less unfavourable to historical study than the chaos 
of the Revolution. The College de France remained standing 1 ; 
but the Professor of History found it advisable to select his sub- 
jects from the ancient world. The most important event during 
the Revolution was the creation of the National Museum by 
Lenoir. 2 The fall of the ancien regime was followed by a whole- 
sale destruction of artistic treasures as the symbols of a despotic 
and superstitious age ; but at the height of revolutionary van- 
dalism Lenoir intervened at the risk of his life, and shepherded 
many of the threatened monuments into the Convent des Petits- 
Augustins. The Museum, arranged with loving care by its 
curator, exerted an even greater influence on historical study 
than on art. Scattered in many churches, the monuments 
had produced little impression ; collected under one roof and 
arranged in chronological order, they compelled attention. It 
was while wandering through its halls that the youthful Michelet 
found his vocation. 

In the last year of the Consulate, Napoleon abolished the 
Academy of Moral and Political Science and created a department 
of Ancient History and Literature. Thus no place was found in 
the Institute for modern and mediaeval history. But when he 
became Emperor his conception of the utility of historical study 
appeared to undergo a change. In 1806 he utilised the weeks of 
leisure after the Jena campaign to dictate two long Memoirs. 3 

1 See Monod, ' La Chaire de l'Histoire au College de France,' Revue 
Hislorique, vol. xc. 

2 See Courajod, Alexandre Lenoir, 2 vols., 187S-86, and article in 
Revue Historique, vol. xxx. 

3 See Corves pondance de Napoleon, vol. xv., 102-110, and Lefranc, 
Histoire du College de France, 1893. 



158 HISTORY 'AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. He suggested a sort of University or enlarged College de France, 
IX in which there would be Chairs of Roman, Greek, Byzantine, 
French, English, and American history. There would also be 
instruction in special subjects, among them the history of legisla- 
tion from Rome to the Consulate, and the evolution of the art of 
war in France. ' There is one part of history which cannot be 
learned from books, that of the time nearest our own. There is 
always a gap of fifty years before one's birth.' The Professors 
would have to know everything up to the moment when they 
were speaking. ' It is often said that history can only be written 
long after the events. I do not agree. One can say what occurred 
one year after an event as well as a hundred years. It is more 
likely to be true because the reader can judge by his own know- 
ledge.' The University was to possess a strictly practical charac- 
ter. ' I do not want philosophy nor ecclesiastical history, but 
the history of facts.' The magnificent plan conceived at the 
Castle of Finkenstein remained a dream, and was indeed im- 
possible of realisation. France did not possess the men ; and 
even if scholars had been available the Emperor would have 
treated them as State functionaries. Any savant innocently 
accepting an appointment would have found himself in a gilded 
cage. The spirit which would have reigned was revealed with 
brutal frankness only a year later. 

In 1808 the Abbe Halma, librarian to the Empress, applied 
to the Emperor for permission to continue Velly and Henault 
The Minister of the Interior replied that the Government must 
reserve its encouragement for objects of more serious interest. 
The Emperor, when informed of the response, dictated the 
following memorandum ] : ' I do not approve of the principles 
enunciated by the Minister of the Interior. It would be most 
useful to continue both Velly and Henault. It is of the highest 
importance to make sure of the spirit in which the continuation 
will be written. I have directed the Minister of Police to see to the 
continuation of Millot, and it is my desire that the two Ministers 
should arrange for the continuation of Velly and Henault. The 
work must be entrusted not only to authors of real talent but to 
trustworthy men who will present the facts in their true light 
and offer healthy instruction by leading the reader up to the 
year 8. It will be necessary in every line to make apparent the 
influence of the Court of Rome and the feebleness of the Valois 
and the Bourbons, to paint the massacres of September and the 
horrors of the Revolution with the same brush as the Inquisition 

1 See Correspondence de Napoleon, vol. xvi., 489-91, and Merlet, Tableau 
de la Litterature Frangaise, 1800-1815, vol. ii, 1883, 



HISTORICAL STUDIES IN FRANCE 159 

and the massacres of the Seize. The perpetual disorder of the CHAP, 
finances, the pretensions of the Parliament, the absence of regular- IX 
ity in the administration must be brought out, so that the reader 
breathes a sigh of relief on arriving at our time. When this work, 
skilfully performed and written with the proper tendency, has 
appeared, no one will have the wish or the patience to do it again, 
especially when, so far from being encouraged by the police, 
he would receive discouragement.' This cynical memorandum 
explains the sterility of historiography under the Empire. His- 
tory was a State monopoly and was subject to the Minister of 
Police. A volume of the Abbe Millot's ' Histoire de France ' was 
suppressed on the ground that it contained things contrary to the 
glory of the armies of France. A play on Belisarius was forbidden 
lest it might suggest the fate of Moreau, another on Henri IV 
because it was undesirable to recall the most popular monarch 
who had ever sat on the French throne. In this asphyxiating 
atmosphere neither literature nor research could breathe. While 
Europe lay prostrate at the Emperor's feet, Paris was feeding on 
the insipid fare of Ponsard and Delille. 

Napoleon's sole merit in the sphere of historical studies was 
to appoint Daunou l to the control of the national archives. 
The wholesale destruction of documents had produced a reaction, 
and in 1794 a Commission was founded with Camus, a scholarly 
Jansenist, at its head. Before 1789 it was estimated that not less 
than 10,000 depots existed, of which 400 were in Paris alone. 
Instructions were now issued, and to a large extent obeyed, 
that documents should be brought together and preserved in the 
capital of each Department. In 1804 Camus was succeeded by 
Daunou, who possessed a wide knowledge of historical literature 
and commanded universal respect. Though he had entered 
the priesthood in early life he had welcomed the Revolution and 
accepted the Constitution Civile ; but he had always been on the 
side of moderation. During the Directory he devoted himself 
chiefly to education, and took a leading part in the foundation of 
the Institute. On the establishment of the Consulate he retired 
from political life, and it was to the scholar not the politician that 
the Emperor entrusted the archives. Though he had never been 
numbered among the avowed partisans of the Empire, Napoleon 

1 The best study of Daunou is by Guerard, Notice sur D., 1S55. Cp. 
Taillandier, Documents biographiques sur D., 1S41. There are excellent 
appreciations by Mignet, Notices et Mcmoires, vol. L, 1843 ; Sainte-Beuve, 
in Portyaits contemporains, vol. iv. ; Le Clerc, in Histoire Litteraire de la 
France, vol. xx., and S. de Sacy, Varietes Litteraires, vol. ii. ; 1858, All 
these writers knew him personally. 



160 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, more than once turned to him for assistance. When the con- 

IX flict with the Papacy approached, he was commissioned to write 

a book on the Temporal Power of the Popes, and accepted the 

task without hesitation. He had thrown off his orders and his 

I belief at the outset of the Revolution, and entertained a whole- 

\ hearted contempt for the Roman Church. His thesis was that 

since the ninth century the Papacy had been the chief cause of 

the misfortunes of Europe. He sympathised with religious 

belief, but declared emphatically that the temporal power must 

disappear. The book belonged to the class of histories which the 

f Emperor appreciated, its purpose being to provide the Govern- 
ment with a weapon in the prosecution of its policy. Daunou was 
more profitably employed in continuing for the Institute the 
unfinished works of the Benedictines. Towards the end of the 
Empire, assisted by Dom Brial and Ginguene, he resumed the 
' Histoire Litteraire ' where it had been interrupted at the twelfth 
century, and remained the soul of the enterprise during the rest 
of his life. 

The most important of the few historical books of the time 
was Flassan's ' History of French Diplomacy.' ' While Napoleon 
was First Consul,' writes the author in the preface to the second 
edition, ' he informed a deputation of the historical class of the 
Institute that he desired a work on the diplomacy of France.' 
The commission was accepted, and the first history of a nation's 
diplomacy ever written appeared. Many documents and treaties 
were published for the first time ; but its value lay exclusively 
in the materials. It closed, as the Emperor desired that all 
histories should close, with a flattering reference to himself. 
Laying down his pen at the opening of the Great War, Flassan 
reminds his readers that France then entered on a period of con- 
fusion which lasted ' till the appearance of power directed by 
genius.' Fulsome though the tribute was, the Emperor declared 
that he had made indiscreet use of his opportunities, and con- 
demned the attempt to reveal to the world the secret springs of the 
political machine. Such a ruler could appoint historiographers, 
but he could not produce historians. Camp-followers of the army 
of literature could be picked up ; but the men who were worth 
buying could not be bought. 

The only work of power and importance produced by a member 
of the Emperor's circle was the ' Venetian History ' of Daru, 1 who 
organised the supplies for the Imperial armies, accompanied his 
master on campaigns, and after the Moscow disaster became 
Minister of War. The plan was formed in 1797, and at the 
1 See Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du Lundi, vol. ix. 



HISTORICAL STUDIES IN FRANCE 161 

plundering of the city he obtained a number of valuable docu- CHAP 
ments. The volumes appeared in rapid succession between 1815 IX 
and 1819, and gained immense popularity throughout Europe. 
The narrative is grave and tranquil ; but the picture is drawn 
in very sombre colours. The secrecy and severity of the Govern- 
ment and the moral corruption of the people are sharply em- 
phasised, and the whole work marches towards the conclusion that 
when Napoleon intervened the victim richly deserved her fate. 
Daru's volumes were the work rather of a publicist than of a J 
scholar, and aroused passionate resentment among patriotic 
Venetians, who charged him with a deliberate design to decry 
the Republic. He rejoined that he had written with waucL__. 
praise of the valour, the art and the industry of Venetian citizens. 
But Count Tiepolo, 1 the most formidable of his critics, declared . 
that the worst charges were based on worthless sources, and 
published two volumes of rectifications. Stimulated by these 
and other criticisms, Daru undertook new researches, and in- 
corporated his results in successive editions. Among his readers 
was Napoleon at St. Helena, to whom Lord Holland forwarded 
the volumes, and whose criticisms on the death-struggle of the 
Republic were incorporated in the second edition. The work 
retained its place as the standard history of Venice till it was 
superseded a generation later by the scholarly narrative of 
Romanin. 

During the years of Napoleonic rule, a period of iron coercion 
and intellectual sterility, Chateaubriand's writings were setting 
free the springs of emotion, enlarging the imaginative horizon 
and stimulating the historical sense. 2 Though his knowledge I 
was fragmentary and his temperament averse from systematic . 
study, to Chateaubriand more than any other man is due the 
efflorescence of historical studies in France under the Restoration. 
In literature he was but carrying on the traditions of Rousseau 
and Bernardin de Saint Pierre ; in history it was his supreme 
achievement to unlock the Middle Ages. His first work is of 
interest not as a preparation for but as a contrast to his riper 
productions. Written in England in 1797, the ' Essay on Revolu- 
tions ' is remarkable for its detachment from the shibboleths of 
contending parties. Though a noble and an emigre, he declares 
that the French Revolution was inevitable ; but^ie is a stranger 
to the illusions of its champions. His task is to discover its 

1 Rettificazioni della Storia del Daru, 1828. 

2 The two most important books on Chateaubriand are by Sainte- 
Beuve, C. et son groupe litteraire sous V Empire, 1861, and Cassagne, La 
Vie politique de C, 191 1. Cp. Bertrand, La Fin du Ciassicisme, 1897. 

M 



: 



{ 



162 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, causes and to forecast its consequences by a survey of similar 

Ix | upheavals. His study of Greek history reveals that most modern 

' battle-cries were familiar to the classical world, and he draws 

'' the conclusion that humanity moves in a circle. The French 

Revolution will probably collapse like the others, and progress 

Iwill once more prove to be a delusion. Indeed Europe appears 
to be nearing a dissolution. Societies perish without a 
religion. Christianity is discredited, and there is nothing to 
replace it. 

The Essay on Revolutions was quickly followed by the author's 
conversion. The new Chateaubriand appeared in the Genie 
du Christianisme, the publication of which in 1802 was an event 
in politics and religion, in historiography and in literature. 
Synchronising with the Concordat, it gave an incalculable 
impetus to the current that was bearing France away from the 
traditions of the eighteenthxentury. Its religious impressiveness 
I has long since disappeared, its scholarship is superficial, and it 
is now read purely as literature ; but a century ago it was 
hailed as a masterpiece of apologetics. In a series of pictures I 
the beauties of Christianity were displayed in dazzling colours, 
its dogmas and its legends, its mysteries, its ritual and its art. 
But he does more than vindicate the claim of Christianity to be 
the dominant factor in modern civilisation. He connects it 
with the glories of ancient France. He recalls the inspiring 
figure of St. Louis, and under his brush the Middle Ages glow with 
colour. He argues from the beauty to the truth of Christianity. 
His appeal is to the emotions and the imagination. Few books 
possess less of the historical spirit ; but few have had a more 
far-reaching influence on historical studies. Its influence was con- 
firmed and extended by the appearance of ' Les Martyrs ' in 1809. 
The Romans and the Franks live again, and the virtues of the 
Christians throw a soft halo over the picture. There is but little 
exaggeration in the magnificent eulogy passed on Chateaubriand 
in 1840 by Augustin Thierry. ' All who in different ways pursue 
the paths of this century have met him at the source of their 
studies as their first inspiration. There is not one who cannot 
say, as Dante said of Virgil, " Tu duca, tu signore e tu maestro." ' 
The first effect of the forces which Chateaubriand had set 
in motion was seen in Michaud's ' History of the Crusades/ * 
The Emperor granted him permission to consult the archives, 
and the first volume of his work appeared in 181 1. While the 
eighteenth century saw in the Crusades nothing but an orgy of 

1 Jee Mignet, Notices et Memoires historiques, vol. i., Riponse a M, 
Flourens, and Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du Lundi, vol. vii. 



HISTORICAL STUDIES IN FRANCE 163 

superstition, Michaud explained the sentiments out of which CHAP, 
they grew and recalled the heroism which they evoked. His IX 
own convictions made him sympathise with events inspired by 
religious motives, while in rendering justice to the Middle Ages 
he found another opportunity of dissociating himself from the 
Revolution. He endeavoured to show that the Crusades were 
not only defensible as an expression of faith, but that they were 
of real utility in the development of European civilisation. It 
was far more than a purely religious interest to thrust back the 
Eastern invaders, while the confrontation of Europe and Asia 
diminished ignorance, established commercial relations and led 
to the growth of towns. Though lacking brilliance and distinc- 
tion,the book found a ready welcome from a public which had been 
schooled by Chateaubriand. Like Daru, Michaud spent the rest 
of his life in improving his work and enlarging his knowledge. 
He published a Bibliotheque des Croisades, in which he incorporated 
material translated for him by an Orientalist, and towards the end 
of his life set out to visit the scenes of his drama. There was 
nothing of the passionate pilgrim about the careful student, 
who said that he had gone to Jerusalem not to reform the errors 
of his life but to correct the mistakes in his history. His range 
of knowledge is inferior to that of Wilken, and he takes his sources 
as he finds them ; but his interpretation of one of the most signifi- 
cant phenomena of the Middle Ages to the modern world was no 
mean achievement. 

While Michaud was studying the Crusades, Raynouard l 
began to explore the language and literature of the Troubadours. 
He won renown as a dramatist by his tragedy on the Templars, 
whom he surrounded with the aureole of martyrdom, and whose 
vindication he pursued by a volume of documents relating to their 
trial. The Troubadour poems were collected and published in 
six volumes ; but he was more interested in the form than the 
matter. He advanced the contention that Romance was the 
only child of Latin, and in consequence the mother of French, 
Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Catalan. Further research 
was to show that Romance was the elder sister, not the mother, 
of the languages of Latin Europe ; but though the keystone of 
the edifice was loose, he inspired interest in the brilliant civilisation 
of the Midi. 

A far more powerful and original mind had dedicated itself 
to the same province before the appearance of the selections from 
the Troubadours. No Frenchman of his age was so international 

1 See Mignet, Portraits et Notices historiques, vol. i., and Sainte-Beuve, 
Causeries du Lundi, vol. v. 



164 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, in his interests as Fauriel. 1 The friend of Bopp, the elder Schlegel 
IX and Corais, the translator of Baggesen, the interpreter of Manzoni, 
the student of Homer, of Arabic and of Sanskrit, he possessed a 
mind like an immense reservoir fed by innumerable channels. 
His collection of Greek folk-songs, with a masterly Introduction, 
introduced Europe to a new literature. Towards the end of the 
Empire he began that profound study of the civilisation of the 
Midi to which he devoted the rest of his life. Before Raynouard 
and every other scholar he realised the beauty of the culture 
which was destroyed by the Albigensian crusade. In tracing ^ 
its origin his studies led him back to the era of Greek colonisation, 
and he determined to survey the civilisation of the Midi in a 
series of works, the first connecting ancient Gaul with the general 
history of antiquity, the second recording the invasions and 
domination of the Franks, the third reaching from the fall of the 
Carolingians to the conclusion of the Albigensian wars. Only 
the second of the three parts was completed ; but the ' History 
of Southern Gaul under the Franks ' is itself a substantial work 
in four volumes. Anticipating the contention of Fustel de 
Coulanges, Fauriel maintains that the invaders brought nothing 
but ruin and chaos in their train. The South resisted better 
than the North, because it was more strongly Latin and because 
it was attacked with less energy. That the invasion rejuvenated 
the corrupt frame of the Roman province he emphatically denies. 
The work opens with a broad survey of the civilisation of the 
fifth century in Roman Gaul and among the invaders respectively. 
The fortunes of the Merovingians and Carolingians are only 
followed in so far as they affect the South, and the main thread 
is the survival of Latin culture throughout the centuries of 
barbarism. In his enthusiasm for the beautiful South he fails 
to recognise the value of the work that was being accomplished 
in the North, and the importance of Charles the Great escapes 
him. 

The third part, dealing with the brilliant civilisation of the 
centuries that followed the break-up of the Carolingian Empire, 
was to have been the crown and culmination of the whole work, 
and was described by Fauriel as the most novel and interesting. 
Portions of the immense material which he had collected were 
utilised in the courses which he delivered at the Sorbonne on 
Provencal poetry and Dante, published after his death by his 
friend Julius Mohl. These admirable lectures treat literature 
as a mirror of civilisation, and throw a flood of light on the 

1 See Galley's Claude Fauriel, 1909, one of the best of French mono- 
graphs. 



HISTORICAL STUDIES IN FRANCE 165 

language and literature, society and morals of the world of the CHAP. 
Troubadours. Though his literary output was small, Fauriel's * x 
influence in the world of scholarship was immense. His vast 
learning made him the guide, philosopher and friend of the genera- 
tion of historians who grew up under the Restoration. Guizot 
and Cousin, Thiers and Mignet owed much to his encouragement, 
and Augustin Thierry never wearied of acknowledging the debt 
to his friend and master, ' the father of historic reform, the 
man who gave the impetus and suggested ideas to myself and 
many more.' 

Of less brilliance and originality than Fauriel but far more 
productive was Sismondi, 1 who was descended from a family of 
Ghibellins which had been expelled from Italy in the sixteenth 
century and had fled from France to Geneva at the revocation of 
the Edict of Nantes. When the Revolution broke upon Switzer- 
land he lost his home and sought refuge in Tuscany, where he 
wrote on agriculture, commerce and institutions. His first 
celebrated work, the ' History of the Italian Republics,' began 
to appear in 1807. He had intended at the outset to study the 
constitutions of the cities ; but he soon perceived that to under- 
stand their organisation he must survey not merely the legislation 
but the entire life of the people. Thus imperceptibly his task 
widened into the story of Italy from the fall of the Western 
Empire to his own time. The heart of his subject was the history ( 
of the Republics from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. To 
enter the labyrinth, he declared, a clue was needed. History 
taught that government and laws were the most essential factor 
in the character of peoples, not climate or race. Nowhere was I 
this more clearly seen than in Italy, whose greatness varied 
directly with the volume of liberty she enjoyed, rising as it 
increased and falling as it diminished. When she lost her liberty , 
under Charles V, her influence disappeared, her energy of 
character, activity in commerce and distinction in art vanished. 
The lesson emerges that no State can become or remain great : 
without liberty. ' It can exist in monarchies as w r ell as in repub- 
lics, in federations no less than in a single city. The duty of 
every ruler and every citizen before God and man is to introduce 
the guarantee of liberty into the constitution, whatsoever it be. 
Through it and it alone will men be truly men. Tyranny itself 

1 See Sismondi, Fragments de son Journal et Correspondance, with 
biographical introduction, 1S57. The best appreciations are by Mignet, 
Portraits et Notices historiques, vol. ii., 1852 ; Scherer, Nouvelles Etudes sur 
la Litter ature contemporaine, 1876 ; and Lomenie, Galerie des Contemporains , 
vol. vii. 



166 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, is a continuous revolution, and a people would be mad if they 
IX did not deliver themselves from it.' History was only of use 
for its lessons, and it was the duty of the historian to see that 
they were properly taught. 

The introductory volume carries the reader rapidly through 
the dark centuries that followed the fall of the Western Empire 
in 476, and the detailed narrative begins with the struggle of 
Barbarossa and the Lombard cities. Though an enthusiastic 
supporter of the League he none the less feels the greatness of the 
Emperor. Indeed his passionate love of liberty makes him strict 
rather than indulgent to its guardians. Scattered through the 
volumes are chapters which reveal how far short of the ideal 
every State has fallen. The movement towards despotism 
at last becomes irresistible. ' The peoples had not remained 
\ faithful to the love of liberty and country, and personal passions 
; had arisen,' he declares sadly. The price of liberty is eternal 
vigilance. As vigilance relaxes despotism creeps in. The tragic 
story of the enslavement of Italy since 1530 is dispatched in 
half a dozen chapters, and the history lesson is at an end. In 
an early essay Freeman declared Sismondi's work to be immortal, 
and praised its eloquence, depth and didactic power. This 
enthusiastic eulogy was modified in later years, and the arrange- 
ment of material was declared to be faulty. Manzoni, while 
warmly praising the book as a whole, protested sharply against 
his treatment of the Church. 1 But no one can fail to be impressed 
by its power. What Grote was to do for Greece, Sismondi 
accomplished for the Italian Republics by bringing them before 
the mind of cultured Europe. 

The historian had reached middle age before he visited 
Paris. ' If we must love a nation,' he wrote to the Countess 
of Albany, ' I know none to be preferred to the French.' Like 
Benjamin Constant he welcomed Napoleon on his return from 
Elba as the defender of national independence and the opponent 
of European reaction. After completing the ' Italian Republics ' 
he braced himself to the still larger task of a history of France. 
The first volume of the ' History of the French ' appeared in 1821, 
and the twenty-ninth, bringing the story to the death of Louis XV, 
was published after his death in 1842. He maintained that 
the history of France, like the history of Italy, had never been 
properly written. ' No modern history has been absolutely 
free from those necessary lies, those respectful reticences which 
destroy our confidence and our comprehension of events. 

1 Vindication of Catholic Morality against the Charges of Sismondi, 
1836, Eng. Trans. 



HISTORICAL STUDIES IN FRANCE 167 

1 Frenchmen have always employed history to establish the CHAP. 

' rights of kings or nobles, parliaments or people, instead of *^ 
seeking for the causes of errors with a view to avoiding their 

i repetition. I shall write without subterfuge or indulgence. 
The absolute power of one or many is a poison.' 

Sismondi's work offered the first detailed and comprehensive 
survey of the whole field of French history. In the second 
place it is based on original study, unlike those ' compilations 
from other compilations ' which he aspired to supersede. 
Thirdly, it gave the first intelligible account of the fall of the 
Roman administration in Gaul, the character of the Germanic 
invasions, the structure of feudalism, the rise of the communes, 
and the influence of commerce and industry on political develop- 
ment. ' I know I lack some qualities of an historian which 
others possess,' he wrote ; ■ but I can render one testimony 
to myself, and I am confident posterity will confirm it — I 
have always sought the truth and spared no labour to find it.' 
That he was not a Frenchman made it easier for him to apply 
the critical eye. It suffers nevertheless from grave faults. 
Like Schlosser and Rotteck he judges the men and events 
of past times by the standards of his own, and for lack of 
imagination fails to understand the atmosphere and outlook 
of other ages. ' There is for an historian a holier mission,' he 
wrote a month before his death, ' than that of working to 
extend the renown of a people, and that is to judge every event 
by the great touchstone of the laws of morality, to castigate 
cruelty, greed and perfidy wherever they appear.' But his j 
justice is not tempered with mercy or even with understanding, j 
The austere republican weighs the monarchs in the balance and '- 
finds them wanting. The Protestant rationalist, whose family 
had been driven out by Louis XIV, holds up to condemnation 
the intolerance, the luxury, the worldliness of the Catholic 
clergy. St. Louis was ' the only French King who constantly 
guided his actions by a feeling of duty ' ; but St. Louis was 
the founder of absolute monarchy. The Crusades provoke 
him to lamentations over the sickening cruelty of the contend- 
ing parties, while the Albigensian wars and the sufferings 
of the Jews are described with burning indignation. The | 
vices of the Valois are related with loathing disgust. He 
dwells with most pleasure on pioneers like Etienne Marcel 
and l'Hopital. His first book was a hymn to liberty, his 
second a philippic against the blighting despotism of kings 
and priests"! 

This lack of relativity did not escape his more discerning 



168 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, readers. ' In his virtuous indignation,' remarked Barante, 1 
IX ' Sismondi becomes the personal enemy of all the kings, nobles and 
bishops of the past.' ' I am sure that he is truthful and therefore 
that he thinks he is just,' wrote that acute and charming critic, 
the Duchesse de Broglie ; ' but as he does not possess the I 
necessary imagination to transport himself to another time, 
he sees actions independently of motives and sentiments. His 
hatred of priests is wearisome, and he judges Hugh Capet as he 
would judge a Genevese syndic of the nineteenth century.' 
In striking contrast to the shrill depreciation of the ruling 
powers is his enthusiasm for the towns. Wherever large towns 
existed, in France or elsewhere, a republican spirit was manifest. 
That the Communes gained their liberty from the crown is a 
legend. ' The French people conquered for themselves so much 
liberty as they possessed at the point of the sword, as liberty 
should always be acquired.' His rigid Puritanism would 
alone have sufficed to make it impossible for his book to obtain 
popularity in France ; but its chances were further limited 
by grave defects of style. There is but little art in his com- 
position and little movement in his narrative. Themes which 
stir the pulse of other writers evoke no response in him. He 
remarks that Joan of Arc was only possible in an age of super- 
stition. Even those who admired his sterling qualities lamented 
that the kernel was hidden in such a prickly husk. ' Sismondi 
interests me,' wrote Sainte-Aulaire to Barante, his brother 
historian, ' as much as it is possible to be interested when one is 
bored. I am sure you will not make us pay this price for the 
instruction that you give us.' .While he was at work Guizot 
was subjecting mediaeval France to a profound analysis and 
Michelet was irradiating it with the gorgeous hues of his fancy. 
In the last weeks of his life he wrote, ' I have given the French 
nation what it did not possess, a complete picture of its existence.' 
It is the fate of the pioneer that he aids his successors to rival 
his own achievement. 

1 These quotations are from Barante, Souvenirs, vol. iii., 1893. 



CHAPTER X 

THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL. — THIERRY AND MICHELET 



A new and more vivid method of writing history was inaugurated CHAP, 
by Augustin Thierry, 1 who convinced his countrymen that the ( X 
past was not dead and that its actors were men of like passions with ! 
ourselves. Few passages in French literature are more familiar 
than that in which he has related the origin of his historical 
vocation as a lad of fifteen. ' In 1810 I was finishing my classes 
at the college of Blois when a copy of " Les Martyrs " fell into my 
hands. We fought for the book, and it was agreed that each 
should have it in turn. When it came to me I remained at home 
all day. As the dramatic contrast of the savage warrior and the 
civilised soldier unfolded itself, I was more and more impressed. 
The effect of the war-song of the Franks was electric. I rose 
from my seat and, marching up and down the room, I shouted, 
" Pharamond, Pharamond, nous avons combattu avec l'epee." 

This moment of enthusiasm was perhaps decisive for my vocation. 

I had no consciousness of what had occurred. I even forgot 
it for some years. But when, after the inevitable uncertainties 
as to the choice of a career, I devoted myself entirely to history, 
I recalled this incident in its smallest details. Such is my debt to 
the writer of genius who opened and dominates the century.' 

This famous picture, painted in 1840, is perhaps a little over- 
coloured ; but it correctly traces Thierry's earliest interest in 
history to the inspiration of the greatest of the romantics. For 
some years, however, his main occupation was not history but 
politics. He fell under the spell of Saint-Simon, became his 

1 See Renan's exquisite essay, Essais de Morale et de Critique, 1857; 
Brunetiere's centenary address, Revue des Deux Mondes, Nov. 15, 1895 ; and 
Revue de Synthase historique, vol. xiii. Arbois de Jubainville, Deux 
Mc.nieres d'ecrire VHistoire, Critique de Bossuet, Thierry et Fustel de Cou- 
Icmges, 1896, contains a severe criticism. 



170 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, secretary, and even described himself as his adopted son ; but, 
X like others, he soon found his master's eccentric ways intolerable, 
and threw himself into j ournalism. His enthusiasm for liberty led 
him to search for weapons in the armoury of history. His articles, 
republished in his ' Dix Ans d'Etudes historiques,' though rapidly 
conceived and executed, reveal the taste for colour and the l ove , 
of original sources which were to distinguish his mature work,. 
His ' Histoire veritable de Jacques Bonhomme ' stated his philo- 
sophy of the history of France. ' Since the day when servitude, 
the daughter of the invading armies, put its foot in France, it 
seems to have been ordained that it should never leave it. Ban- 
ished under one form it has reappeared in another. After the 
Romans came the Franks, then the absolute Monarchy, then the 
Empire, now the exceptional laws. Did nature destine this 
beautiful country for such a fate ? ' Such passages were con- 
sidered too audacious, and Thierry's journalistic career came to 
an end. He had gained insight into the world of action, and he 
brought with him into his library the keen sympathy with the 
masses that he learned from Saint-Simon. 

In 1820 Thierry began the systematic study of the sources 
of French history. ' As I advanced in my reading, the lively 
pleasure arising from the contemporary pictures of men and 
things was blended with a dull anger at our modern writers who 
have travestied the facts, misrepresented the characters, and 
clothed everything in false or uncertain colours. As I read I 
seemed to have found my true vocation — not only to light up 
some corners of the Middle Ages, but to plant the flag of historic 
reform for France.' The Benedictines had collected facts, but 
not understood them ; had furnished materials for history, but 
not written it. The stupendous events of the last fifty years 
had taught everyone a lesson. With this added experience it 
was possible to understand much in the Middle Ages that had 
been hidden, to read between the lines of the chronicles, to clothe 
skeletons with flesh and blood. The historian needed erudition, 
knowledge of life and imagination. If one or more were lacking 
he could not do his work. 

It was in this spirit that the famous work on the Norman 
Conquest was composed. If Chateaubriand had fired his imagina- 
tion as a lad, it was Scott who most deeply influenced his mind. 
' My admiration for this great writer was profound ; it grew 
as I contrasted his wonderful comprehension of the past with 
the petty erudition of the most celebrated modern historians. I 
saluted the appearance of " Ivanhoe " with transports of enthu- 
siasm.' He learned from Hume that English institutions con- 



THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL 171 

tained more of aristocracy than of liberty. ' The idea struck CHAP, 
me, that dates from a conquest.' As his researches continued x 
he found that States now homogeneous revealed traces of early 
racial differences, which became stronger as they were traced 
backwards. In some countries the classes faithfully represented 
the races, the conquerors surviving as a privileged caste. This 
key appeared to him to unlock English history till the accession 
of Henry VII. England was now one nation, but there were still 
more Norman names among the country squires than among 
artisans and traders. The book is thus the elaboration of a theory / 
in the guise of a narrative. Its success was unprecedented. For 
the first time an historical work had been produced of supreme 
literary distinction. He saw everything in colour and relief. 
He had learned from Scott, ' that great master of historic divina- 
tion,' that the scenes of the past could be brought to life by the 
power of imagination. The Middle Ages were only dull because 
no one understood how to interpret their monuments. In his 
hands the texts not only related facts but revealed a world. 
When he was old and blind he sometimes asked Renan, then a 
young man, to aid him in research. ' I never witnessed without 
astonishment,' records Renan, ' the promptness with which he 
seized the document and adopted it for his narrative. The 
least fragment revealed to him an organic whole which, by a sort 
of regenerative power, rose complete before his imagination.' 
Where others discovered Providence or the action of general 
causes, he saw the struggles of living men and women. History 
ceased to be a procession of shadows across a darkened stage. 
He ends a chapter with the emphatic words, ' These men have 
been dead for seven hundred years. But what of that ? For 
the imagination there is no past.' 

The ' Conquete d'Angleterre ' was the revelation of a new 
art. Its ardent sympathy with the people secured it a warm 
welcome at a moment when the best minds of France were 
engaged in a struggle with the last of the Bourbons. Moreover, 
the explanation of the history of England by a simple formula 
made a profound impression on a generation that was beginning 
to feel the need of new interpretations not less than of wider 
knowledge. Yet the thesis of the work was false. The political 
results of the Conquest, on which he lays little stress, were 
profound ; the social and moral consequences, on which he 
insists, were temporary. That racial antagonism is the master- 
key to the centuries following the battle of Hastings is not an 
exaggeration but a delusion. No part is more brilliant than 
that which describes the career of Becket, who is exalted into 



172 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, the champion of the down-trodden Anglo-Saxons. His theory 
x of racial cleavage blinds him to the fact that the career of the 
Archbishop was simply an episode in the European struggle 
between Church and State. In his preface he naively remarks 
' I have a sort of partiality for the conquered.' His sympathies 
are with the crowd. Brunetiere has called him the most demo- 
cratic and the most socialistic of historians. A child of the 
romanticists, he was stronger in imagination than in criticism. 
He took the chroniclers as he found them. Thus he employs the 
' Roman de Rou ' for the landing of the Conqueror, and even 
quotes his speech before the battle of Hastings— an exercise as 
rhetorical as the orations in Thucydides and Livy. 

No sooner had he achieved his resounding triumph than 
he lost his eyesight. Chateaubriand remarked in his gallant 
manner, ' History will have its Homer, and I am the first of 
his admirers.' Despite this terrible affliction, he continued his 
labours. Indeed his later works are in some respects superior 
to that which gained him fame. The ' Recits des temps Mero- 
vingiens' were scarcely less popular than the 'Conquete.' It 
was a mistake, he declared, to dismiss the Merovingian epoch 
as the most confused and arid period in French history. 
Such a narrator as Gregory of Tours did not appear again till 
Froissart. The life of the nation emerged as if by magic from 
the dust of the chronicles. His favourite theory of the conflict of 
races finds ample scope. He pictures Gallo-Roman civilisation 
struggling against Frank barbarism. The Merovingians, who 
had been the terror of every reader, were seen to be as interesting 
as other rulers. His limpid style, his ardent sympathies, his 
skill in turning dust into gold were never more decisively 
displayed ; but his artistic instinct sometimes carries him 
a little too far. He is not wholly guiltless of adding touches 
to his narrative for which his sources give no authority. He 
unlocked the Merovingian age ; but its systematic exploration 
needed more exact scholarship. When Thierry published 
his ' Recits ' in a collected form in 1840, he added to them 
' Considerations on the History of France.' ' The national mass,' 
he declares emphatically, ' by blood and laws, by language 
and ideas, is Gallo-Roman.' The Franks substituted vassalage 
for the Roman social order which they found, and in the North 
Teutonic influence almost obliterated the earlier culture. 
But in the South an emancipating movement, starting from 
Italy, made itself felt in the towns, where the debris of Roman 
municipalities still existed. In the towns were born self- 
government and equality before the law. They made the tiers 



THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL 



173 



etat, and the tiers etat made the nation. As civilisation CHAP. 
grows, the racial factor declines in importance, and original X 
differences are merged. 

The later years of the historian's life were deeply influenced 
by the school which owed its foundation to Guizot. When 
invited in 1836 to edit documents relating to the growth of 
the communes, he accepted the task without hesitation. His 
long introduction, later published as a separate volume, is his 
ripest work. The student of chronicles became the student of 
charters. We hear little of the conqueror and the conquered, and 
he recognises that the obvious traces of the Frankish conquest 
had vanished by the tenth century. He traces the gradual rise 
of the bourgeoisie, reconstructs old municipal France, and 
brings the story of the States General down to the triumph 
of absolutism. The book is not without mistakes. He shares 
the error that the Roman municipalities lingered on. Luchaire 
has censured his use of modern terms such as liberty and equality, 
and maintained that he made the towns more democratic than 
they were. Giry has criticised his theory of the relation of the gild 
to the town. But the book is more than a sketch of municipal 
institutions ; it is also his final reading of French history. His 
theme is the gradual elevation of all classes and the fall of 
aristocratic barriers. His main achievement was to introduce 
a new figure, the people, and to set it, where it ought to be, 
in the foreground of the picture. 

The fame of Amedee Thierry l is overshadowed by that of his 
elder brother ; but his books enjoyed scarcely less popularity 
at the time of their appearance. The ' History of the Gauls before 
the Roman Conquest ' attempted to build up a connected story 
from the fragmentary sources. Mainly relying on the aid of 
philology, he traced their wanderings and settlements in Italy 
and Spain, Greece, Asia Minor and Syria. The Gauls, he 
declares, were brave and generous, but did not possess the 
instinct of union. With its virtues and weaknesses the Gallic 
blood was still dominant in the veins of France. The vivid 
style and the novelty of the theme secured a warm welcome, 
and encouraged him to continue his narrative. His ' Gaul under 
Roman Administration ' possessed less novelty. The book is 
a psan on Roman rule. The Romans, he contends, found Gaul 
barbarous and left it civilised. Having brought his narrative 
to the point where his brother's ' Recits ' begin, Amedee devoted 
himself to the study of the later centuries of the Roman Empire. 
In his life of Attila he pictures the death agony of the Empire ; 
1 See Mignet, Nouveaux £loges historiques. 



174 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, in his studies of Jerome and Chrysostom he traces in glowing 
X colours the rise of the power which was to succeed it. His 
writings are neither profound nor critical ; but they did much 
to arouse interest in history. 

A third member of the romantic school was Barante, 1 who, 
like Thierry, was profoundly influenced by the learning and 
vitality of Scott. Believing that the old chroniclers had only 
to be known and understood to be loved, he selected the age 
which was illustrated by Froissart, Monstrelet and Commines. 
The first two volumes of the ' History of the Dukes of Burgundy ' 
appeared in 1824. Of all Scott's novels none had aroused so 
much interest in France as ' Quentin Durward,' and Barante 
had chosen the century which it had illuminated. Its success 
exceeded all anticipations. The Duchesse de Dino told the 
author that she had devoured rather than read the book, and 
that there was nothing to criticise and nothing to desire. Begin- 
ning with the battle of Poitiers, in which the first Duke of Bur- 
gundy took part, and ending with the battle of Nancy, in which 
Charles the Bold fell fighting, the theme possesses artistic and 
dramatic unity. But it is far more than a history of Burgundy. 
It is also a stage on which appear Du Guesclin and the Black 
Prince, Joan of Arc and Louis XI. A second cause of its success 
was the author's good fortune in his sources. His object was to 
reveal to his countrymen the wealth they possessed in their 
chronicles. He determined not to intervene between them and his 
readers. Now he quotes long passages in full ; at other times he 
summarises his sources with a slight touch of archaism. ' There 
is no more historian or author,' he wrote ; ' it is the truth itself 
which the eye of the reader beholds.' A critic who examined 
the first three volumes discovered only one reflection, and that 
was borrowed from Froissart. The preface may be described 
as a dissertation on the words of Quintilian which adorn the 
title-page, Historia scribitur ad narrandum, non ad probandum. 
Most historians, he asserts, fail to convey the interest of their 
sources because they insist on looking at the past with the stand- 
ards of their own time. People must be brought living before 
our eyes, and the reader can draw any conclusion that he likes. 
' I have tried to restore to history the interest that the historical 
novel has borrowed from it. Before all it must be exact ; but 
I think it can also be true and living.' He had removed every 
trace of his own work, and added neither judgment nor reflection. 

1 See Guizot, M. de Barante, 1867, Eng. trans., and Sainte-Beuve, 
Portraits contemporains, vol. iv. Barante's Souvenirs, vol. hi., 1893, 
contain much correspondence relating to his principal work. 



THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL 175 

What he thought of the occurrences of four centuries ago mattered CHAP. 
little. The manifesto provoked a good deal of criticism, even X 
among those who greeted the book itself with acclamation. His 
friend and political ally, Guizot, after congratulating him on 
his success, went on to say, ' If you had presented the system in a 
somewhat less absolute manner, if you had said that the genre 
should vary with the subject and that your method was especially 
suited to the epoch you were treating, there would be practically 
nothing to contest.' To another friend, Saint- Aulaire, he replied 
that his preface had a particular, not a general reference. ' I 
had no desire to lay down absolute rules. Other times and other 
subjects would not admit of this method. But one must not 
mix up things which are mutually exclusive. A philosophical 
purpose cannot be combined with the delights of narration and 
the dramatic painting of events. I wanted people to see the 
fifteenth century instead of hearing it described.' Moreover, 
though he abstained from suggesting conclusions, he desired his 
readers to draw them for themselves, and expressed the hope 
that his book would be of use in the eternal struggle of power 
and liberty, force and justice. But the work now seems lifeless 
and artificial, and the modern student demands something 
more than a painstaking paraphrase of the chronicles. 



II 

Though Michelet l was too individual to be styled a member 
of any group, he approached most closely to the school of Augustin 
Thierry. Combining his passionate love for the people with a 
grandeur and poetry of his own, he stands out as the greatest 
literary artist who has ever devoted himself to history in France. 
Owing to his intense interest in himself, Michelet's outer and inner 
life is known in extraordinary detail. The only child of a small 
printer, his earliest recollections were of grinding poverty. He 
grew up a nervous, excitable, under-nourished lad, ignorant 
of the common joys of children. When his mother died he 
resolved never to separate from his father. The elder Michelet 

1 The literature on Michelet is very extensive. The best appreciations 
are by Monod, Renan, Taine, Michelet, 1894; Jules Simon, Mignet, Michelet, 
Henri Martin, 1899 ; and Faguet, Le igieme Siecle. Much biographical 
material is to be found in Monod, Jules Michelet, 1905 ; Mme. Quinet, 
Cinquanie Ans d'Amitie, Michelet-Quinet, 1899; and Noel, Michelet et 
ses Enfants, 1878. Two posthumous volumes, Ma Jeunesse, 1884, and Mon 
Journal, 1888, bring the story to 1823. There is a good article in the 
Quarterly Review, Jan. 1 901, 



176 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, had an unswerving faith in his son, and out of his poverty made 
X sacrifices to send him to a lycee. He lived to witness, though 
hardly to understand, his fame ; and the historian expressed 
his gratitude by providing a comfortable home for the prolonged 
old age of the parent who had made his career possible. - Michelet 's 
mind developed rapidly, and his strongest impression came from 
Lenoir's Museum. ' It is there and nowhere else that I ex- 
perienced the vivid realisation of history. I remember the 
emotion, always the same and always lively, which made my 
heart beat when, as a small child, I passed under those solemn 
arches and gazed at those pale faces. I was not quite certain 
that all these marble sleepers might not be alive ; and when I 
approached the hall of the Merovingians I was not sure that I. 
might not see Chilperic and Fredegonde arise.' 

While still uncertain as to his vocation, Cousin persuaded him 
to learn German and to translate Vico. He had feasted on the 
piety of the ' Imitation,' while rejecting its dogma, and had em- 
braced the faith of the Savoyard Vicar ; but he needed some 
philosophic interpretation of civilisation, and in Vico he found 
the harmony of science and faith. ' He is the prophet of the 
new world. He first showed the role of Providence exercising 
itself, not in the narrow limits of a religion like Bossuet, but in 
man humanising himself by society.' The master's emphasis 
on the contribution of the masses to civilisation, his conviction 
that the social state of a people was mirrored in its law and 
poetry, and his use of etymology as a key to human origins 
struck notes of delighted response. The translation of the 
Scienza Nuova, which gave the spirit rather than the letter, 
made his greatest work known not only to France but to Europe. 
Michelet achieved for Vico what Dumont had accomplished for 
Bentham. 

In 1827, tne same y ear i n which the translation of Vico 
appeared, he was appointed to teach history and philosophy 
at the Ecole Normale and published his first narrative work. 
The ' Precis d'Histoire Moderne' drove out the chronological tables 
and bald summaries which were in universal use, and offered 
a survey of the development of civilisation from the fifteenth 
century to the French Revolution, which brought the chief 
events and the leading actors into strong relief. Its freshness 
is partly due to the fact that it was largely based on original 
sources. For the first and last time in his life Michelet wrote 
simply and concisely. The book is a well-kept garden, not 
a tropical forest. Never before had a writer of genius and 
learning set himself to compose a book for schools. A year 



THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL 



177 



later he visited Germany. Before starting he met Quinet, CHAP, 
who had recently translated Herder's ' Ideen,' and commenced X 
an historic friendship of half a century. He brought back an 
undying veneration for German philosophy and scholarship, 
and he loved to recall his debt. ' Germany is the bread of life 
for strong minds. She made me greater by Luther and Beethoven , 
Kant, Herder and Grimm.' 

When Michelet crossed the Rhine the learned world was 
ringing with the praises of Niebuhr, whom his youthful enthusiasm 
for Virgil and his studies of Vico had prepared him to appreciate 
at his full worth. The plan of a history of Rome rose before 
his mind. In 1830 he visited Italy for the purpose of his book, 
and in the following year appeared his volumes on the Roman 
Republic. Like Arnold, he removes the mass of scaffolding 
and allows the grandeur of the design to emerge in bold relief. 
But his book is far more than a reproduction of Niebuhr. The 
factor of race is minimised, and the nation is represented as the 
moral image of its dwelling-place. The passion for symbolism, 
which adorns and disfigures his later work, now makes its 
appearance. The Samnite wars were not the strife of two races, 
but the conflict of the plain and the mountain. Cato the Elder 
is ' the old Italian genius,' Caesar ' the man of humanity.' The 
book ends with the death of Cassar, and forms the first complete 
modern survey of the Republic. His assertions about early 
Rome are much too positive, and he makes no serious attempt 
at a critical analysis of his sources, though rejecting Niebuhr's 
theory of lays. But the work rests on wide foundations. Topo- 
graphy, language, law, literature, inscriptions, medals are used 
to supplement the chronicle and the legend. Though only 
a sketch of a vast subject, it is full of ideas and throbs with life. 
' An incomparable work,' declared Monod half a century later, 
' full of original and profound views, and in some respects not 
yet surpassed.' 

The ' Introduction to Universal History,' published in 1831, 
ranks among the most brilliant productions of its author. Briefly 
and eloquently, touching only the summits of the mountains, he 
marks out the position which the chief nations have occupied. 
' With the world began a war which will only finish with the end 
of the world, that of man against nature, mind against matter, 
liberty against fatality. History is nothing else than the record 
of this ceaseless struggle.' Following the course of the sun, 
which is the course of civilisation, we see the dominion of nature 
diminishing at every stage. India is at her mercy, like a child 
at its mother's breast. Persia introduces the principle of 



178 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, light, which will one day confound the principle of darkness. 
X Egypt accepts the immortality of the soul. The Jews worship 
Jehovah above and apart from nature. Greece and Rome 
develop the arts and sciences ; but they fall because they are 
not built on a foundation of liberty. Christianity glorifies 
the spirit. Modern Europe is an organism, one part of which 
is unintelligible without the rest. Germany is the land of 
renunciation, of sympathy, of mysticism. Italy is individual 
and independent, the heir of Rome, the land of politics and law. 
England is proud, heroic, aristocratic, the first of modern nations 
to struggle for liberty while caring nothing for equality. France, 
on the other hand, is constructive, free, democratic. The 
Revolution of 1830 is the consummation of French history, 
and it is her proud destiny, having won liberty for herself, to 
inaugurate the era of democracy, which is liberty incarnate. 
The governing idea of the survey had been stated in Quinet's 
introduction to his translation of Herder. ' History is the 
drama of liberty, the protest of the human race against the 
world which enchains it, the freedom of the spirit, the reign of 
the soul.' Its application is utterly arbitrary and unscientific. 
He begins with India ; but China is older and at the same time 
less despotic and superstitious. The parallelism of history 
and the sun breaks down at the start. Again Egypt is reached 
before Judaea, though the latter is east of the former. He 
traces the progress of freedom, but fails to prove that history is 
nothing more than its realisation. 

The ' Introduction to Universal History ' was a hymn to the 
glories of France as the principal actor in the drama of liberty. 
Michelet's next task was to treat her history in detail, and at 
his creative touch she became a person. The first six volumes 
of the ' History of France ' are his most perfect and enduring 
work. They were written when his genius had reached its fullest 
development and before his imagination had become diseased. 
Flis object is ' the resurrection of the life of the past as a whole,' 
the land and the people, events, institutions and beliefs. Though 
his work is based on original sources, he makes large use of his 
brother historians. ' I owe much to the conscientious history 
of our venerable Sismondi, and the beautiful narratives of the 
Thierrys have never left me. I owe even more to the writings 
of Guizot and to his kindly interest.' Despite this indebtedness, 
Michelet's book is the most original work on the history of France 
ever written. The first volume sketches the centuries before 
Hugh Capet, and characterises the races out of which a united 
nation was to arise. The Celts are credited with sociability, 



THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL 179 

love of action and rhetoric. The Germans are impersonal and CHAP. 
dreamy, and a vague indecision rests on their features. The X 
second volume examines the stage on which the drama is played. 
The ' Tableau de France ' is not only one of the most signal 
achievements of the historian's genius, but the application of a 
new instrument of interpretation. Michelet was the first to 
realise the importance of the geographical factor in the develop- 
ment of his country. He maintained that political divisions 
corresponded to physical divisions and that each province had 
its peculiar role, as each organ its function in the human body. 
He sketches the provinces in turn, their features, their climate, 
their inhabitants, their character, their contribution to the 
national life. Resting thus on a generous recognition of the 
complex elements of which France was composed, the book is 
of all French histories the least dynastic and the most truly 
national. 

The narrative is rather a series of scenes than a record of 
events. He hurries across large tracts of territory, and lingers 
over individuals and occurrences that strike his imagination. 
Of these gorgeous tableaux the earliest is the fall of the Templars, 
the documents relating to which he edited for Guizot's collection 
of State Papers. The most famous depicts Joan of Arc, the sum- 
mit of his achievement and one of the imperishable glories of 
French literature. His moving narrative reproduces the atmo- 
sphere of the Middle Ages, its burning life, its blending of patriotism 
and religion, its exaltation and degradation. The radiant figure 
of the Maid stands out against the dark background of France 
in the reign of Charles VI. Scarcely less exquisite are the pages 
devoted to mediaeval art and to the ' Imitation,' ' the most beauti- 
ful of Christian books after the Gospels.' The sixth volume, con- 
taining a powerful full-length portrait of Louis XI, embodied 
more new material than any of its predecessors. As a result 
of his researches, declared the author with pride, the conven- 
tional figures of Scott and Barante had entirely disappeared. 
His judgments are on the whole extraordinarily fair. He pays 
little attention to kings, but he is not their enemy, and St. 
Louis has never had a more devoted admirer. The Church is 
treated with conspicuous sympathy, and parts of the book seem 
an echo of the ' Genie du Christianisme.' He never forgets that he 
is writing a history of the whole nation. The soul of France had 
grown by the complex influences which transform individuals. 
' Who has modified, smelted, transmuted these elements, made 
them a body ? France herself, by internal labour, by mysterious 
parturition, blended of necessity and liberty.' He scornfully 



180 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, repudiates the doctrines of race, of the influence of conquest, 
X of the providential role of great men. Organic life cannot be 
explained, for it is a mystery. 

The greatest of Michelet's gifts was his sympathetic imagina- 
tion. No writer has ever approached the history of France 
with such passionate and personal love. ' If I am superior to 
other historians it is because I have loved more.' The supreme 
actor merges his own personality in the parts that he plays. His 
power of expression equals his power of imagination. What he sees 
he can make others see. The most casual entry in his note-books 
is as personal as the most highly wrought passage in his writings. 
The grain of sand is transformed by the microscope into a vision 
of glory. His pages are ablaze with colour. Taine has com- 
pared him to Dore and Delacroix, Monod to a great musician. 
He is the Victor Hugo of history. But these unique gifts involve 
the lack of certain qualities which the historian should possess. 
His heart was too full, his emotions too intense, to see life steadily 
and see it whole. Like Carlyle he leaps on the stage, rebukes 
and encourages the performers, and interjects asides to the 
audience. His glance lacks precision, and we dare not trust 
ourselves to his guidance. His passion for symbolism aids 
his readers to visualise the past; but the symbol often swallows 
up the reality. The imagination creates as well as reveals. There 
is something of the atmosphere of the East about his work. ' He 
recalls to me,' wrote Heine, ' the large flowers and the powerful 
perfumes of the Mahabharata.' We are still in the romantic 
movement, the world of colour and passion, of poetry and 
exaggeration. 

The work was received with mingled feelings. 1 Its novelty 
and power, its learning and beauty, were recognised on all hands ; 
but its mysticism came as something of a shock to the sceptical 
liberalism of the bourgeois monarchy. Nisard, for half a century 
the oracle of classical criticism, pointed out the lack of order and 
method, and blamed its accesses of lyrical exaltation. Sainte- 
Beuve, who had lately shed his romantic skin, refused to review 
it on the ground that he was too much out of sympathy with its 
standpoint. Sismondi, on receiving a copy from the author, 
replied that he was filled with astonishment and admiration. 
' You give me new discoveries at every page on the ground 
at which I myself have worked so long ; but I cannot accept 
a personality in the peoples which makes the personality of 

1 The criticisms are summarised in Monod's article, ' Les Debuts 
d'Alphonse Peyrat dans la Critique historique,' Revue Historique, vol. 



THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL 181 

individuals disappear. Your interpretation is wholly novel. CHAP. 
Whether it will convert me is another matter.' In Catholic X 
circles it found warmer praise. On receiving a copy from the 
author Chateaubriand replied that he had always felt that French 
history needed to be rewritten, and Michelet had done it. Monta- 
lembert, an old pupil, declared that he was stupefied by its 
colossal erudition and incomparable verve, and praised the 
impartiality of his treatment of Catholicism. ' I love him,' 
wrote Foisset, ' because his book definitely buries the dry com- 
pilation of Sismondi. Its only fault is that he is not entirely, 
intimately, truly Christian.' 

When Michelet reached the beginning of modern history he 
interrupted his work in order to study the French Revolution. 
He declared that he could not understand the monarchical 
age without establishing in himself the soul and faith of 
the people ; but the real reason was quite different. A 
determined attack on University teaching was commenced by 
Louis Veuillot and his associates ; and Michelet and Quinet, 
at that time the most popular Professors in France, 
entered warmly into the fray, delivering simultaneously 
a course of lectures on the Jesuits. Every address was a 
battle-cry, and Paris rang with the sound of conflict. The 
Professors believed that intellectual and political freedom was 
at stake, and hit out vigorously. The course on ' Priests, 
Women and Families ' held up the confessor to reprobation as 
the destroj^er of the home. The crusade against the Jesuits 
developed into an attack on Christianity, and Guizot cannot be 
blamed for bringing the courses of both Profesors to an end. 
Michelet's emergence as the leader of the anti-clericals so soon 
after his glorification of the mediaeval Church led to embittered 
charges of apostasy. He replied that he had sought baptism 
at the age of eighteen as a means of entering into communion 
with an august historic institution, but had at no period of his 
life accepted its dogmas. Jules Simon assures us that he was 
already a rebel in his lectures at the Ecole Normale in 1834. 
But though there is no ground for a charge of apostasy, his 
attitude towards the Church underwent a permanent change. 
He confessed that his picture of mediaeval Christianity was an 
ideal, not a reality. Moreover, he now began to feel his way 
towards new political principles. The July Monarchy came 
in on the flood tide of liberal enthusiasm ; but from 1840, when 
Guizot became supreme, it set itself to combat democratic 
aspirations. As Thiers and Mignet had used the French Revolu- 
tion to overturn Charles X, so Michelet and Lamartine employed 



182 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, it to undermine the position of his successor. He dreamed of a 

x regenerated France, free alike from Church and Monarchy, based 

on the principles of justice alone, a France in which the poor 

and the humble would at last come by their rights. This vision 

was embodied in the ' History of the French Revolution.' 

Michelet's second great work differs widely in spirit and 
aim from his first. His task is no longer merely to resuscitate the 
past. He is less the painter than the prophet. Into none of his 
works did he pour so much of his own spirit. ' The Revolution 
is in us, in our souls. In principle it was the triumph of law, 
the resurrection of justice, the reaction of ideas against brute 
force. It began by loving everything. In its benevolent period 
the whole people were the actors ; in the period of cruelty, only 
a few individuals.' Its early days were sacred. Never since 
Joan of Arc had there been such a ray from on high. After 
centuries of oppression the people emerged, reorganised society, 
and set an example to the world. Through the smoke and flames 
he perceives the growth of a new France, a new Europe. He 
begins by discussing the new conception of justice from which 
the Revolution arose. Voltaire had answered the question, 
Can there be religion without justice and humanity ? Rousseau 
had founded social right on an impregnable basis. ' Let them 
stand for ever on the same pedestal, twin apostles of humanity. 
When they have passed, the Revolution is already accomplished 
in the mind of France.' The outbreak is painted in the warm 
hues of admiring sympathy, and he renders intelligible the days 
of credulous enthusiasm and infinite hopes. His ' Fete of the 
Federation ' stands with his ' Joan of Arc ' as one of the 
supreme achievements of French literature. In 1789, he declares, 
France became conscious of her liberty, in 1790 of her unity. 
Her heart was full of magnanimity, clemency and pardon. The 
artificial barriers between classes, parties and nations fell away, 
and the soul of the people was revealed in its unsullied radiance. 
Never did a great revolution cost less blood or tears. She ap- 
peared to the world in the guise of the angel of liberty. ' From 
the Rhine, the Netherlands, the Alps the voice of suppliants 
reached her. She had only to step beyond her frontiers for them 
to kneel before her. She came not as a nation but as Justice, 
Eternal Reason, demanding nothing of men but that they should 
realise their own highest aspirations. Happy days of our inno- 
cence ! France had not entered on the path of violence, nor 
Europe on that of hatred and envy.' Mirabeau and the early 
leaders made the mistake of believing in the monarchy, and 
their work needed supplementing ; but their successors proved 



THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL 183 

unequal to the task. France was saved in spite of the Terror, CHAP. 
which delayed the success of the Revolution for half a century. X 
Marat was the ape of Rousseau, Robespierre a contemptible 
pedant, 1 the September Massacres an indelible stain on the 
national honour. But the enemies of the Revolution no more 
escape than its false friends. The Queen was guilty, for she 
had called in the foreigner. The King had played fast and loose 
with his promises, and his death, though a blunder, was not a 
crime. The revolt of the Vendeans was incredible ingratitude. 
But there is little bitterness in the book. ' All find their recon- 
ciliation in the heart of France.' 

With the exception of Carlyle, Michelet's book is the most 
brilliant picture ever painted of the greatest event in modern 
history, and Aulard has described it as the truest, though not 
the most exact, history of the Revolution. ' From the first 
page to the last,' he wrote at the end of his task, ' there is only 
one hero — the people.' He loves Danton because he sees in him 
the truest incarnation of the soul of the people. The work thus 
gains artistic and historic unity. Destruction and reconstruction 
are seen to be parts of the same process. The work was a con- 
tribution to knowledge as well as to interpretation. He used 
the registers of the Commune of Paris, which perished with the 
destruction of the Hotel de Ville in 1871. During his residence 
at Nantes after the coup d'etat he explored the archives for the 
history of the Vendee risings. Above all, he had learned in- 
numerable details from his father and other eye-witnesses of every 
episode of the Revolution. But though the book possesses 
unique merits, his judgment of the Revolution is unacceptable. 
The voice of the people is the voice of God. Whatever was good 
in the Revolution was the work of ' the people ' ; whatever was 
bad was the work of somebody else. The existence of the 
canaille, the ferocious passions of the mob, the hatred and envy 
which accompanied the vast upheaval are hardly suggested. 
If he is too tender to the masses, he is too harsh to the Church. 
He regards the Revolution as a struggle between two conceptions 
of life, the strife of rationalist democracy against Christian 
monarchy. The men are won for the Revolution, but the women 
remain in the hands of the priest, to whom above all was due the 
check of the movement. The execution of the work is not less 
faulty than its general conception. Some events are described 
with infinite detail, others no less important are scarcely noticed. 
The book swarms with errors, and suffers from exaggeration 

1 It was above all his view of Robespierre that was attacked by Robes- 
pierre's biographer, Hamel, in Michelet Historien, 1869. 



184 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, and effervescence. It is the epic of democracy, the most 
x eloquent defence of the ideals of the Revolution ever written. 1 

After an interruption of ten years Michelet returned to the 
task which had been interrupted by the struggle with clericalism. 
Louis Napoleon was now on the throne, the Church was powerful, 
democracy was discredited. His personal position was precarious. 
His refusal to take the oath lost him the Professorship to which 
he had been reappointed on the fall of Louis Philippe, and his 
post in the Archives followed it. He found comfort in the society 
of his devoted second wife, 2 and in observing and recording the 
wonders of bird and insect, sea and mountain. But his spirit 
was soured. While the Middle Ages were described by a happy 
man, the later volumes breathe hatred and disenchantment. 
Though the treatment is far more detailed, there is less research, 
less care and less reflection. His faults grow upon him. He 
generalises from isolated facts. His personal prejudices become 
more strident. He refers great events to trivial causes. In 
too many pages we listen to the outpourings of a scurrilous 
pamphleteer. 

Each of the eleven volumes of the new series bears a title. 
That on the Renaissance yields to none of its predecessors in 
power and brilliancy, though its preface strikes a frankly anti- 
Christian note. The Reformation, like the Renaissance, is 
glorified as a revolt against the Middle Ages and a forerunner of 
1789. 3 As the work advanced its faults increased. The gossip 
of memoir-writers is greedily swallowed, and no Court scandal 
is too disgusting or improbable to find credence. He speculates 
on the legitimacy of Louis XIII and Louis XIV, and with the 
Regency and Louis XV introduces us to incest. The manu- 
script journals of the physicians of Louis XIV are called in to 
solve the problems of high politics. The King's life divides into 
a period of success and of failure — before and after the operation 
for fistula. Foreign policy is increasingly neglected. From a 
history of the nation the book often degenerates into a series of 
causeries on the Court. One critic described it as ' a bad book and 
a bad act,' and Montalembert wrote mournfully of his old teacher 
as a fallen idol. On the other hand, it abounds in striking ideas 
and in brilliant pictures. Many of its pages are beautiful and 

1 For the gratitude of anti-clerical republicans see Spuller, Figures 
disparues, vol. i., 1886. 

2 See the Lettres a Mile. Malairet, 1847-9, a volume in the CEuvres 
Completes. 

3 These two volumes are the text of Taine's brilliant appreciation in 
his Essais de Critique et d'Histoire. 



THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL 185 

precious, and. the sympathy for the poor and, suffering is deep CHAP, 
and real. The chapters on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes X 
ring with a noble indignation. He is incomparable on the 
corruption of the Valois, the pride of the Grand Monarque, the 
madness of Law. Nor is he without his moments of generosity. 
He feels something of the greatness of Henri IV and Sully, 
and weeps over the grave of the Duke of Burgundy. 1 

The ' Bible of Humanity ' reveals the extent to which the 
mystical and romantic elements lived on beneath the newer 
rationalism. Each civilisation is a verse written in the eternal, 
ever-growing book. India, Persia, Egypt, Judaea, Greece, Rome, 
Christianity are stages in this revelation of reason and justice. 
The power of magical evocation remains, but the faculty of 
criticism, never strong, almost disappears. The war of 1870 and 
the Commune broke his heart, and the three volumes on Napoleon 
which followed reveal incurable decline. His genius and. method 
were too individual to found a school ; but his writings and 
lectures exerted a profound influence, and such admirable 
scholars as Cheruel and Duruy claimed him as their master. A 
far larger number could echo the words of Monod : ' I owe my 
vocation for history to him ; I am not a disciple, but I am in- 
spired by a deeper feeling, that of filial gratitude.' No historian 
has done so much to make French history a reality. No historian 
has loved France so tenderly. To him that loved, much may be 
forgiven. 

1 One of the sanest criticisms of the later volumes is by Sainte-Beuve, 
Nouveaux Lundis, vol. ii. The natural indignation of Catholic royalists 
may be seen in de Broglie, Questions de Religion et d'Histoire, vol. i., i860, 
and d'Haussonville, Etudes biographiques et litteraires, 1879. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE POLITICAL SCHOOL. — GUIZOT, MIGNET, THIERS 

CHAP. The school which was founded by Thierry and reached the sum- 
XI mit of its achievement in Michelet grew out of the romantic 
movement and perished with it. By its side arose a group of 
writers whose object was rather to explain than to narrate, to 
teach than to paint, for whom the individual was of less interest 
than the State, the anatomy and physiology of history of greater 
importance than its outward form and colour. Among its main 
interests were the structure of society, the evolution of forms of 
government and the relation of states to one another. Its ideal 
was to apply the methods of science to history. 



Guizot was the child of Protestant parents, and retained 
throughout life the grave austerity of French Protestantism.* 
His father had revolted against the excesses of the Revolution, 
and paid the penalty with his life. The son remained through 
life a moderate liberal of 1789. He quickly became known as a 
young man of wide erudition and marked ability ; and in 1812, 
at the age of twenty-four, Fontanes appointed him suppliant 
to Lacretehe in the Chair of History at the Sorbonne. On the 
fall of the Empire he entered public life. He had already won 
a prominent place among the small but distinguished group of 
the Doctrinaires or Whigs who followed Royer-Cohard. As 
their representative he journeyed to Ghent to persuade Louis 
XVIII to grant a Constitution, and during the early years of 

1 See Guizot's voluminous Memoirs and the correspondence published 
after his death. The best biography is by Bardoux, 1894 ; the best apprecia- 
tions by Jules Simon, Thiers, Guizot, Remusat, 1885, Faguet, Politiques 
et Moralistes, vol. i., and Flint, Philosophy of History. 



THE POLITICAL SCHOOL 187 

the Restoration he occupied a series of high administrative CHAP, 
posts. In two remarkable pamphlets he urged the claims of the XI 
middle classes to be the deciding influence in politics, and preached 
the ideals of the Juste Milieu. The predominance of the educated 
bourgeoisie was the true mean between the rival absurdities 
of divine right and the sovereignty of the mob. The foes of 
society were absolutism and Jacobinism. At the present moment 
the counter-revolution was the enemy. The ground that had 
been won in the Revolution must never be surrendered ; but 
it could only be permanently maintained by the equilibrium of a 
genuinely constitutional monarchy. 

The fall of the Doctrinaires in 1820 restored Guizot to his 
Chair, and the first course, on the origins of representative 
government, gave expression to his enthusiasm for English 
institutions. Of greater importance were the lectures on the 
institutions of France, which, like their predecessors, were the 
vehicle of political propaganda. Indeed so closely did they 
approach to the burning problems of the hour that the Professor 
was silenced in 1822. Part of the course appeared in 1823 in his 
•' Essays on the History of France.' His object was to inquire 
how free, aristocratic and monarchical institutions struggled and 
combined until the tenth century. The first and most important 
essay treats of municipal government in the Roman Empire. 
Why did the Empire fall ? Slavery, luxury and despotism had 
all existed throughout the Imperial era. Guizot came nearer an 
explanation when he recalled that it was largely an agglomera- 
tion of towns and explained how the curiales, who controlled 
municipal affairs and were responsible for the revenue, sank under 
the burden. When the middle classes were ruined by taxation, 
it had no other resources. The following essays, dealing with 
the establishment of the Franks in Gaul, the causes of the fall 
of the Merovingians and Carolingians, the institutions of the 
Franks and the feudal regime reveal a convinced Germanist. 
The closing essay on the causes of the establishment of the repre- 
sentative system in England explains how the competing interests 
of King, nobles and commons resulted in an equilibrium which 
allowed of the growth of a free and orderly government. 

After describing mediaeval England in his lectures and essays 
and modern England in his pamphlets, Guizot plunged into the 
constitutional struggle of the seventeenth century. He begins 
his - Histoty of the English Revolution ' with the accession of 
Charles I. No attempt was made to discover new materials, or 
to dramatise the conflict. It is an engraving, not a picture. 
We are in the hands of a statesman engaged in the search for 



188 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, practical lessons, who is in no doubt as to which side was right. 
XI The contrast with the French Revolution is continually before 
his eyes. England wisely made no attempt to break the natural 
course of events. The leaders of the popular party appealed to 
precedent, and merely resisted the abuse of the royal prerogative. 
There were several causes of this fundamental difference. The 
English Revolution was political, not social. It sought liberty, 
not equality. It was religious, not rationalistic. It was carried 
through by men of property and high intelligence like Hampden 
and Pym, the pioneers of the movement towards rational liberty 
which has changed the face of the world. 

The work was interrupted by a return to his Chair in 1828. 
It is on the lectures delivered in the next three years that his 
world-wide fame as an historian rests. He left an ineffaceable 
impression on his hearers. Jules Simon declared that he was 
eloquence incarnate ; but unlike most eloquent men he expressed 
himself with great conciseness. Political allusions were now 
rigorously excluded. He appeared to his audience to treat of 
human affairs as if he was elevated above the petty struggles of 
humanity. The ' History of Civilisation in Europe,' with which 
he began, provided the first intelligible survey and ushered in a 
new method of study. The modern world, he declared, was 
superior to the ancient because it combined valuable elements 
which previously existed in isolation. The Roman Empire left 
the municipal system, a written law and the idea of Imperial 
rule. The Christian Church contributed lofty doctrines and a 
world-wide organisation. The barbarians brought with them 
personal liberty and the habit of voluntary association. These 
elements needed a prolonged period for their amalgamation, and 
the Middle Ages were the battle-ground of their claims. Feudal- 
ism and ecclesiastical pretensions must be treated with respect 
as incorporating venerable traditions or responding to widely felt 
needs. But the main organ and symbol of progress during the 
later Middle Ages was to be found in the growth of a middle class 
between the aristocracy and the peasantry ; for its existence 
involved in the long run representative government. The 
Reformation encouraged the critical spirit ; and the Puritan 
Revolution marked the triumph of self-government in England 
and the beginning of its conquest of the civilised world. The 
course ends on the eve of the French Revolution, which the 
growth of the tiers etat in numbers, intelligence and wealth 
rendered inevitable. 

The lectures differ greatly in value ; but the course as a 
whole constituted an enormous advance in the interpretation 



THE POLITICAL SCHOOL 189 

of history, and is still the most suggestive survey of the develop- CHAP, 
ment of European civilisation. Guizot sweeps the field as from XI 
a lofty watch-tower. His eye is always on the distant horizon 
and the collective achievement. His philosophy of history is an 
unshakable belief in Providence ; but the transformations of 
society are explained on purely secular grounds. His presentation 
of the successive stages of European life offers little ground for 
criticism ; but the influence of individuals and the chapter of 
accidents are under-estimated. The epochs dovetail too neatly 
into one another, and the design of the mosaic is suspiciously 
correct. When Sainte-Beuve had read these lofty discourses he 
took down from his shelves a volume of De Retz to remind him 
how history was really made. The criticism is a little malicious 
but not altogether undeserved. There is peril in mingling with 
the crowd ; but there is also danger in surveying the changes and 
chances of mortal life from the summit of Olympus. 

Guizot followed his first course by a detailed examination of 
the development of civilisation in France, which he chose as a 
mirror of the destinies of Europe. He begins by describing the 
social and intellectual; civil and religious condition of Gaul 
before the German invasion, the character and institutions of the 
Germans beyond the Rhine, and finally the invasion itself and 
the interaction of the barbarian and Romanised societies. In the 
civil order he sketches the origin and character of the barbarian 
codes. In the religious world he describes the internal organisa- 
tion of the Church and its relation to civil society. Intellectual 
life is illustrated by a survey of the scanty literature. The 
character and policy of Charles the Great, his administrative 
reforms, his influence on legislation and education, are minutely 
studied. A sketch of the Church and the development of theology 
and philosophy brings the survey to a close. In thirty lectures 
the life of five centuries is analysed with extraordinary skill and 
ample learning. In 1830 he began a similar investigation of the 
feudal period, which he defined as extending from Hugh Capet 
to Philippe le Bel. When he had completed his survey of 
feudalism and the monarchy, the course was suddenly brought 
to an end by the revolution of 1830, which launched the historian 
on the troubled sea of politics. 

The abrupt termination of the '■ History of Civilisation in 
France ' is one of the heaviest losses which historical science 
has ever sustained. Even in its fragmentary form it stands out 
as one of the greatest achievements of the century. Guizot 
was the first to dissect a society as the anatomist dissects a body, 
the first to study the functions of the social organism as the 



HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

:AP. physiologist those of the animal. The work is a model of arrange- 
XI ment, doing justice to the vast variety of phenomena which 
make up civilisation while keeping steadily in view the unity of 
national life. The lectures convinced the most sceptical of the 
possibility of a scientific treatment of history. None of his 
predecessors approached and none of his successors has rivalled 
him in his power of arranging and comparing great masses of 
facts, in tracing their concatenation, in analysing the forces which 
they embody. No one has ever surpassed him in his capacity to 
seize the ideas which underlie events, to discern the inner changes 
which govern outward transformations, to recover the intellectual 
tendencies of an epoch. 

The criticisms suggested by the course of 1828 were equally 
relevant to its successors. He himself declared that the historian 
has a threefold task. He must collect his facts and know how 
they are connected — that may be called historical anatomy. 
He must discover the organisation and life of societies, the laws 
which preside over the course of events — that is the physiology 
of history. ' But do you know also their external physiognomy ? 
Have you before your eyes their individual features ? The facts 
now dead once lived ; unless they have become alive to you 
you know them not. The investigation of facts, the study of -heir 
relation, the reproduction of their form and motion, these con- 
stitute history, and every great historical work must be judged 
by these tests.' This passage is at once a testimony to Guizot's 
lofty conception of the duties of the historian and a sentence on 
his own limitations. The reproduction of the living physiognomy 
of the past is beyond him. He admired Scott and Fennimore 
Cooper and recommended the study of their novels ; but he 
shows no trace of their influence. He lacks narrative and 
descriptive power, pictorial and dramatic imagination, interest 
for the individual and the particular. History, again, is once 
more too symmetrical. The most penetrating criticism of this 
intellectual habit came from Sainte-Beuve. 1 ' Guizot's writings 
form a chain from which you cannot remove a link. His aim is 
to rule and organise the past as well as the present. I am one of 
those who doubt if it is given to man to embrace the causes 
of his history with this completeness and certitude. He 
finds it almost beyond his strength to understand the present. 
History seen from a distance undergoes a singular metamor- 
phosis ; it produces the illusion — the most dangerous of all — 
that it is rational. The follies, the ambitions, the thousand 

1 Causeries, vol. i. Cp. the later articles on the Memoirs in Nouveaux 
Lundis. 



THE POLITICAL SCHOOL 



191 



strange accidents which compose it, all these disappear. Every CHAP, 
accident becomes a necessity. Guizot's history is far too XI 
logical to be true.' Like other pioneers he had the defects of 
his qualities. 

Guizot employed his high position in the State to further 
the interests of history in many ways. The organisation of 
historical studies in France dates from the reign of Louis Philippe. 
In the words of Thierry, history became a national institution. 
The first of his undertakings was the formation of a Societe de 
l'histoire de France, 1 with the aid of Thiers, Mignet, Barante, 
Fauriel, Raynouard, Guerard and other well-known scholars. 
Its activities included new editions of the chroniclers and the 
publication of manuscript material, such as the letters of Mazarin 
and the records of the trial of Joan of Arc. On the death of 
Barante in 1866 Guizot, who had watched over its fortunes 
throughout, became President, to be succeeded on his death by 
Leopold Delisle. Its work has been of high quality, and nearly 
every French historian of distinction has been a member. Of 
far greater importance was the project for the publication of the 
manuscript sources of French history at the expense of the State. 
The idea was not new. 3 Moreau, who became the historio- 
grapher of France at the close of the reign of Louis XV, con- 
ceived the idea of obtaining copies of charters and documents. 
A Cabinet des Chartes was founded in 1762, and the main burden 
of transcription was undertaken by the Benedictines. The sup- 
pression of the Order ruined the enterprise ; but the labour of 
copying innumerable charters just before the storm in which so 
many of the originals disappeared was not thrown away. In 
1833 Guizot sent a memorandum to the King proposing that 
the State should undertake the publication of manuscripts. 
The utmost efforts of isolated individuals, he declared, could 
only produce partial and limited results. Untold riches lay 
buried in the archives of France. Louis Philippe was sympa- 
thetic, and a committee was formed at the Ministry of Public 
Instruction to act as a centre and guide for local endeavours. 
Among the earliest volumes of the Documents Inedits were the 
works of Mignet on the Spanish Succession, Thierry on the Tiers 
Etat, and Guerard's editions of the Abbey Cartularies. Differing 
from the Monumenta and the Rolls' series in confining itself to 
unpublished material, the magnificent enterprise has proved 

1 See Jourdain, Notices et Documents a V occasion du $oieme A nniversaire, 
1884. 

2 See the exhaustive work of Xavier Charmes, Le GomiU des Travaux 
historiques, 3 vols., 1886. 



192 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, of priceless service to the development of historical studies in 
XI France. A final service was the revival of the Academy of 
Moral and Political Sciences. 

When the ministry and the monarchy fell together in 1848 
Guizot returned not to the unfinished history of his own country 
but to that of the land in which he sought refuge from the storm. 
During the reign of Louis Philippe his only literary effort was a 
French edition of the writings and correspondence of Washington. 
The grave and eloquent panegyric which served as an Introduc- 
tion repeated his well-known convictions. The Anglo-Saxon 
race, he declared, had known how to conduct its revolutions in 
both hemispheres. It was with a heightened admiration for 
England that he resumed his studies of the Puritan revolution 
after an interval of a quarter of a century. Though much light 
had been thrown upon the period, the later volumes differ little 
from the earlier. His chequered career made the storms of the 
seventeenth century more real to him, and he excels in analysing 
the debates and recording the movement of ideas. But there 
is no more colour than of old. There are no flowery paths nor 
sunlit landscapes. His main task is still to teach and to warn. 
He is as convinced as ever of the beneficence of the revolution ; 
but experience had made him a little more critical. He 
virtually accepts Carlyle's demonstration of Cromwell's sin- 
cerity, but rejects the estimate of his statesmanship. Of the 
three great Anglo-Saxon revolutions led by Cromwell, William III 
and Washington, the first was the least successful. Cromwell 
founded nothing, because he pursued, however unwillingly, a 
revolutionary policy. He speaks with the greatest severity of 
Vane, Ludlow and the doctrinaire republicans of a type only too 
familiar to the minister of Louis Philippe. His lofty austerity 
and aloofness is not to everybody's taste ; but it produces the 
same feeling of confidence as a volume of Ranke. He had in- 
tended to bring his history down to 1688 ; but the desire to write 
his Apologia led him to end with the Restoration. While the 
early volumes on Charles I contained no fresh material, new 
light was shed on the foreign policy of the Commonwealth, and 
the volumes on Richard Cromwell were a real contribution to 
knowledge. The series ended with a volume on Monk- Though 
the ' English Revolution ' is inferior in importance to the 
' Civilisation in France,' it was a notable contribution to the 
interpretation of a momentous crisis and may still be read with 
interest and profit. 1 

1 Cp. Taine's brilliant essay, Essais de Critique et d'Histoire. 



THE POLITICAL SCHOOL 193 

II CHAP. 

XI 

In the early years of the Restoration two young Provencals 
set out for Paris, linked in intimate friendship and inspired by 
similar ideas and ambitions. Mignet ,1 the elder, who occupies 
the higher place in the hierarchy of French historians, was born 
at Aix in 1796. The overwhelming events connected with the 
fall of the Empire intensified his interest in politics, and the 
house became a centre of political discussion. Among their 
visitors was Thiers, who left Marseilles to study law at Aix. 
The friendship thus begun lasted without a cloud for sixty years. 
The young advocates watched the excesses of the Restoration 
with growing anger ; but while Thiers was already dreaming of 
office, Mignet combined historical study with his practice, and 
won a prize offered by the Academy of Inscriptions for a study 
of the Institutions of St. Louis. His essay impressed men so 
different as Daunou and Dom Brial, and deserved its welcome, 
not merely for its striking picture of the Christian King and his 
code but for its luminous survey of feudal and monarchical 
France. It contains, moreover, the first indication of the 
author's historical ideas. ' How consistently things act, how 
they accomplish themselves necessarily and make use of men 
as means and of events as occasions ! From the beginning of the 
French monarchy it is less men who have guided things than 
things which have directed men. Under the first two dynasties 
France reveals a tendency to independence, culminating in 
feudal anarchy ; in the third, a tendency to order, culminating 
in absolutism, followed by a tendency to liberty, culminating 
in the Revolution.' Here is the full-grown Mignet — his sub- 
ordination of individuals, his power of condensing thought, and 
the first statement of that fatalism for which he was to be so 
often attacked. 

The young historian came to Paris in 1821 to receive his prize 
and to pursue his fortunes. Thiers followed him, and the friends 
found no difficulty in obtaining employment on the press. Their 
articles attracted the notice of Talleyrand, and in a few months 
they were familiar figures in the salons of the Opposition. Mignet 
had no intention of allowing journalism to monopolise his energies, 
and began a course at the Athenee, which Sainte-Beuve described 
when both had become famous. 2 ' I well remember the first 
lectures in which he approached the sixteenth century and 

1 The fullest account is by Petit, FranfOts Mignet, 1889 ; the best 
appreciation by Jules Simon, Mignet, Michelet, Henri Martin, 1890. 

2 Portraits conteniporains, vol. v. 

o 



194 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, the Reformation. The young historian of twenty-six spoke of 
XI St. Bartholomew and the causes which led up to it. Everyone 
felt himself gripped with a serious interest, dominated by the 
grave accent and the telling phrase. The slightly Puritan 
pronunciation and the weighty delivery redoubled their effect, 
coming from a young man so full of brilliance and smiling with 
grace. He possessed both austerity and culture, both reflection 
and candour.' At a moment when Guizot had been silenced 
and Daunou's conscientious discourses were followed by a hand- 
ful of students, the lectures were an event. A second course on 
the English Revolution, seasoned with attacks on the govern- 
ment, was no less successful. 

The growing reaction of the later years of Louis XVIII 
strengthened the Liberal Opposition, and France was divided 
into the friends and foes of the Revolution. Mme. de Stael's 
' Considerations,' published in 1818, had aroused keen interest. 
' The book entirely changed current opinion,' records Mme. de 
Boigne, 1 ' by boldly speaking in honourable terms of the Revolu- 
tion. Where she set the example, panegyrics poured forth, 
and few minds had the balance to extract the good grain from 
the blood-stained tares.' It was, however, rather a discussion 
of principles than a narrative of events. The bare summaries of 
Lacretelle satisfied no one, and France was eager for further 
enlightenment. The friends now resolved to attack the dynasty 
through a glorification of the Revolution. In his lectures Mignet 
had shown how the work of 1640 required for its completion the 
work of 1688, and drew the inference that constitutional govern- 
ment could never be safe except under a dynasty prepared to 
accept it. He now applied the lesson to his own country. His 
' Precis of the French Revolution,' written during four months' 
absence from Paris, appeared in 1824. Its success was immediate 
and enduring. It was quickly translated into many languages, 
six separate versions appearing in Germany. The highest 
tribute to the book is that, though based on scanty research and 
never rewritten, it still maintains its utility. 

Though Mignet had no access to new material, he had learned 
a good deal from Talleyrand, Daunou and other surviving actors. 
He utilised the experience of his witnesses without sharing their 
passions, and rescued the cause of the Revolution from those 
who had served it badly. His greatest gift was to seize and 
reproduce the logical connection of events. He revealed the 
Revolution as an organic whole to a generation which knew 

1 Memoirs, vol. ii. 277-8, 



THE POLITICAL SCHOOL 195 

it as a legend and a tradition. He showed that it was not an CHAP. 
accidental convulsion, but the logical result of history and the XI 
mother of a new society. Cool though the temperature be, the 
historian leaves no doubt as to his convictions. The introduction 
establishes the necessity of a far-reaching change, and this 
necessity dominates the book. If a legitimate revolution falls 
into excesses, that is no ground for rejecting its principle. But 
he never pleads that the end justifies the means. He sternly 
condemns the Terror, whose only method of government was 
death. Louis XVI combined the two qualities which make 
good kings, the fear of God and the love of the people. Danton 
was bought by the Court. The Revolution goes its way, with 
many good men on the wrong side and many bad men on the 
right. 

The ' Precis ' has often been criticised for its lack of the throb- 
bing pulses of life. Croker pronounced it a post-mortem anatomical 
lecture. 1 ' It has a compactness,' declared Carlyle, 2 ' a rigour 
as of riveted rods of iron, the symmetry, if not of a living tree, 
yet of a well-manufactured gridiron ; it is without life, colour, or 
verdure.' Mignet's admirers repty that it was precisely his 
self-possession which enabled him to estimate the actual results 
of the Revolution. A more serious indictment came from Sainte- 
Beuve, 3 who protested against the implication that the Revolu- 
tion had to follow a certain course, and declared that he forgot the 
vast difference which would have been made by the survival of 
Mirabeau or the early death of Robespierre and Napoleon. The 
indictment was repeated by Chateaubriand, 4 who, while eulogising 
the book as ' eloquence applied to reason,' accused the author 
of a belief in inflexible destiny and described him and Thiers 
as the founders of ' the fatalist school.' These charges, though 
not without foundation, are exaggerated. Mignet recognised 
the power of great movements to override individual interest 
or volition, but he had no belief in iron laws. Jules Simon, 
the apostle of idealism and free will, roundly declared that his 
friend was accused of fatalism because he believed in logic. At 
the most it was but a rationalistic modification of Bossuet's 
principle, L'homme s'agite, Dieu le mine. 

The book was an incident in the campaign against the 
Bourbon dynasty, and Mignet returned to his journalism. With 
the accession of Charles X, of whom Royer-Collard observed 
that he always remained the Comte d'Artois, reaction became 

1 Essays on the French Revolution, 1857. " Critical Essays, vol. vi. 
3 Premiers Lundis, vol. i. 4 Preface to Etudes historiques. 

o 2 



196 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, the settled policy of the government. It was largely against the 
XI National, a paper founded and edited by Mignet, Thiers and 
Carrel, that the Ordonnances of Polignac were aimed in July 1830. 
The order to suspend publication was disobeyed, and next day it 
printed the protest of the journalists of Paris, drawn up by Thiers 
and Mignet, with the name of the latter at the head of the list. 
The three editors took their lives in their hands, and to them, 
more than any other men was due the expulsion of the Bourbons. 
Mignet could have had high office had he cared for it ; but he 
exercised a wise discretion in refusing to embark on the storm and 
tumult of political life. He contented himself with the director- 
ship of the Archives of the Foreign Office, a post for which there 
was no competition and for which he was better fitted than any of 
his countrymen. 

On the termination of his first book he had turned to the 
Reformation, and when the events of 1830 released him from 
journalism he reverted to it. He composed a monograph on the 
Reformation in Geneva ; but on receiving a pressing invitation 
to aid Guizot in the publication of the sources of French 
history, he undertook to collect and edit the documents relating 
to the Spanish succession. Four volumes brought the story to 
the Peace of Nymwegen ; but though the documentary part was 
not completed, the Introduction, which traces the story to its 
close , ranks with the masterpieces of historical literature . Despite 
its extreme condensation it is unsurpassed for insight, judgment 
and learning, for clearness and firmness in thought and style. 
In addition to exhibiting the relations of France and Spain, and 
indeed the grouping of the European Powers, for over half a 
century, it provides a gallery of portraits of the leading statesmen 
of the age. It is in these pages that Mazarin first received justice 
as a diplomat, and that the figure of Lionne, his successor, is 
revived. The Grand Monarque himself appears in a new light. 
Though the impression is rather of industry than of insight, of 
good sense in detail than of foresight, no one can study Mignet's 
volumes without the conviction that Louis was more than a man 
of pleasure and ceremony. The work, with which diplomatic 
history was born, was hailed with applause in the world of scholar- 
ship ; and though supplemented by researches in the archives 
of other countries, it has never been superseded. 1 The ' Spanish 
Succession,' though for obvious reasons the least popular of his 
works, was his most precious contribution to history. 

While engaged in the exploration of French diplomacy, 
1 There is a fine eulogy in Legrelle, La Diplomatie francaise et la Suc- 
cession d'Espagne, 1895, which continued his work. 



THE POLITICAL SCHOOL 197 

the historian continued to work steadily at the Reformation. In CHAP. 
1840 he had finished the introduction, which he described as a XI 
survey of Christianity and the human mind from the end of anti- 
quity. But the work which represented so much labour was 
never destined to see the light. Its author refused to let it appear 
alone, and the ' History of the Reformation ' was never written. 
Though his great plan remained unfulfilled, the work of his 
later life dealt almost exclusively with the sixteenth century. 
The first of these masterly monographs was devoted to Antonio 
Perez, whose romantic story possesses the interest of a novel. 
But it is much more than a study of a brilliant adventurer ; it is a 
contribution to our knowledge of the reign of Philip II. The 
relations of Perez to Princess Eboli, the real causes of the murder 
of Escovedo, the loss of its privileges by Aragon are for the first 
time elucidated. From Philip to Mary Stuart was but a step. 
Mignet's volumes grew out of Labanoff's great collection of the 
Queen's correspondence, supplemented by the despatches of the 
Spanish ambassadors at Simancas. While accepting the Casket 
letters, he believes that Mary was rather passionate than vicious, 
and that her later life was purified and chastened by her sufferings 
and courage. But the theme was chosen, not for the personality 
of the Queen, but for her role in the religious struggle. The title 
declares that it is a history, not a biography. We witness a 
war between principles rather than between persons. Mignet's 
book has been superseded by the mass of material discovered 
since its publication ; but it was the first balanced portrait, and 
it is still a useful corrective to the competing extravagances of 
her biographers. 

From Mary Stuart he returned to the great Emperor whose 
figure had attracted him when he began to study the Reforma- 
tion. The mystery of his retirement had been solved by Stirling- 
Maxwell and Gachard ; but Mignet adduced new proofs that the 
abdication was the result of diplomatic not less than physical or 
religious reasons, and that some of the main currents of European 
diplomacy flowed through the portals of the remote Spanish 
monastery. From the closing scene of the eventful reign he 
worked back to its opening. A long series of articles on the 
rivalry of Francis and Charles were reprinted from the Revue 
des Deux Mondes, with little change, in two large volumes. 
The survey was not continued beyond 1529, though the author 
lived for several years after its publication. His last and longest 
work contained more new material than any of his narratives. 
It presented a picture of European politics based on the archives 
of France, Spain and Austria, and checked by the reports of 



198 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, the Venetian ambassadors. Mignet's historical work is relatively 
XI small in volume, but of the finest quality. Every phrase is 
studied and every judgment has been weighed. He is the Ranke 
of France, and he disputes with Guizot the title of the greatest 
French historian of the first half of the nineteenth century. 
' The elevated, august and even sacred character of history,' 
declares Sainte-Beuve, ' is engraved on everything he writes.' 
Like Guizot, he was interested in men mainly as they influenced 
institutions and movements, and considered them rather as 
workers than as personalities. No historian has done more 
to apply the methods and spirit of scientific research to the life 
of States. 

In another department his fame is equally secure. When 
Guizot revived the Academie des Sciences morales et politiques 
in 1833, Mignet was among the earliest of the new members, and 
in 1837 h e was appointed Perpetual Secretary. For nearly half 
a century his immense knowledge, his capacity for business and 
his sound judgment made him the ruler and guide of that illustrious 
body. So great was the respect for him, records his successor 
Jules Simon, that no proposals were made unless they were 
known to possess his approval. The addresses delivered by the 
Perpetual Secretary gave the eloge a new life and a classic form. 
The same qualities of style and thought that distinguish his 
historical works adorn the appreciations of his colleagues. All 
of them are solid and scholarly studies, revealing an intimate 
acquaintance with philosophy, economics and law, no less than 
history, and some are flawless gems of expression and criticism. 
To read the four volumes of eloges is to walk down a gallery 
of Greek statuary. What Michelet achieved by colour Mignet 
accomplished by purity of line. Heine scoffed at him as a 
' coiffeur de vieilles perruques,' adding that if there was no hair 
on the head he always managed to hide the skull under a wig of 
phrases. This was merely Heine's way of saying that he was an 
indulgent critic. When the gulf was too wide, as in the case 
of Michelet, he left the task of appreciation to his successor. 
In the portraits of the statesmen and thinkers of the Revolution 
he returns to the field where he won his spurs. The eloge of Droz 
sharply attacks Rousseau's doctrines as ' false, mischievous and 
unintelligent.' He censures as fatalism the contention that in its 
later stages the Revolution could not be stopped. But for its 
constructive work his admiration remains undimmed. ' It is the 
immortal glory of the Constituent Assembly to have registered 
in laws the principles which the reason of sages has scattered in 
books. These principles have .become the patrimony, hence- 



THE POLITICAL SCHOOL 199 

forth inalienable, of the human race. When men have once seen CHAP, 
the truth in its splendour they can never forget it. Sooner or ^* 
later it triumphs, for it is the thought of God and the need of the 
world.' 

Ill 

In the same year that Mignet began to write his ' Precis,' his 
alter ego undertook a detailed narrative of the French Revolution. 
The moment when the actors in the drama were about to expire, 
declared Thiers, 1 was the proper time for writing its history, since 
their testimony could be collected by men who did not share their 
passions. The opening volumes were sketchy and careless, 
but their success determined him to devote more attention to his 
work. His object was frankly political. The full results of the 
Revolution, he taught, could only be attained by the expulsion 
of the old dynasty. He was a convinced monarchist, and used 
to say, ' We must cross the Channel, not the Atlantic ' ; but 
it was constitutional monarchy alone to which he owed allegiance. 
He combines an unshakable conviction of the justice and 
necessity of the Revolution with a detached view of its agents. 
' We have to uphold the same cause, but we are not bound to 
defend their conduct. We can separate liberty from those 
who have rendered it disservice.' Like Mignet, he disengages the 
essence of the movement from its horrors. The charge of fatalism 
was warmly repelled in one of the first of the many articles which 
Sainte-Beuve was to devote to his writings. 3 ' To reproach him 
for presenting things in so perfect a connection, in an order 
apparently so inevitable, is to reproach him for having cleared 
up what was obscure.' The accusation might have been avoided 
if he had manifested as much indignation against the executioners 
as he displayed sympathy for the sufferers. He is an outspoken 
opponent of the Terror, he warmly admires the private virtues 
and courage of the royal family, and he blames many actions 
of the Revolutionists ; but he felt too grateful to Carnot and 
the Jacobins for repelling the invader to inflict heavy sentences. 
Jules Simon remarks that his adversaries mistook an explanation 
for an absolution ; and Thiers himself boasted that no one could 
point to a word which excused crime. He wrote at a time when 
the principles of the Revolution were being hotly challenged, and 
he had no wish to put weapons into the hands of its enemies. 

1 The best lives are by Mazade, 1884, and Remusat, 1889. Jules 
Simon's study of his friend and leader, in Thiers, Guizot, Remusat, 1885, is 
masterly. 

2 Premiers Lundis, vol. i. 



200 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. Thiers' book is a narrative of events, not a study of causation 

XI or conditions. Mignet's pages are weighted with judgments 
and reflections ; Thiers hurries on to the next incident and leaves 
the reader to do his own thinking. It is typical of his methods 
and of his temperament that the curtain rises on the storming 
of the Bastille. He keeps on the surface of events, paraphrasing 
the Moniteur and Lacretelle. On the other hand, the handling of 
such financial problems as the currency and the maximum is 
excellent. The Italian campaigns are vividly described, and 
the study of military organisation and strategy is illuminating. 
The chief characteristic of the book is its freshness of treatment. 
It was said of Guizot that he had the air of having known from 
all eternity what he had only learned that morning. Thiers 
had the air of only having learned that morning what he com- 
municated to his readers. Few books leave such an impression 
of youthful buoyancy. Every detail interests him, and he is 
assured that it will interest his readers. ' He marshals a hundred 
thousand facts as a skilful general marshals a hundred thousand 
men,' said Sainte-Beuve. 1 For the first time a detailed narrative 
of the greatest event in modern history was available. Two 
hundred thousand copies were quickly sold, and the book, 
nearly a century later, still finds readers in many lands. 

The ' History of the French Revolution ' scarcely deserves its 
vast popularity ; but some of the charges that have been brought 
against it are greatly exaggerated. ' Thiers has one reference,' 
wrote Carlyle, 3 ' and that is only to a book, not to a page or a 
chapter. A superficial air of order, clearness and calm candour 
is spread over the work ; but inwardly it is waste, inorganic. 
No human head that honestly tries can conceive the French 
Revolution so. A critic undertook to find four errors per hour 
by way of bet, and won. Yet readers may peruse Thiers with 
comfort in certain circumstances, and even profit ; for he is a 
brisk man of his sort, and does tell you much if you know nothing.' 
The assertion that Thiers only once quotes an authority is 
answered by turning to the work itself. Moreover, there were few 
books to which readers could be referred. The ten volumes 
were produced during four years of incessant political fighting ; 
but though many errors were due to carelessness, many arose 
from lack of information. Nor is the charge of wholesale mis- 
conception better founded. Like Mignet, he misread the Giron- 
dins and overpraised the Directory ; but his general approval of 
the aims and results of the Revolution,combined with his repudia- 

1 See the admirable article in Portraits contemporains, vol, iv. 

2 Critical Essays, vol. vi. 



THE POLITICAL SCHOOL 201 

tion of the Terror, represents the broad verdict of history. The CHAP. 
faults of the book are that its view was external, that its author XI 
never realised the importance of obtaining new material, and 
that it was conceived and executed as an incident in a political 
campaign. 1 In a word, he was more of a politician than an historian. 

Thiers entered the service of the King whom he had called 
to the throne ; but when Guizot became supreme in 1840 he 
partially withdrew from political strife. He had brought his 
narrative down to the end of the Directory, and he took up the 
thread where he had dropped it. But the political motive which 
had prompted the earlier work was absent from the later. Though 
Louis Philippe had dispensed with his services, he had no desire 
to overthrow constitutional monarchy. The revival of the 
Napoleonic cult was the result, not the object of the book. 

The Emperor had charged Bignon 3 in his will to write his 
history, and his old servant devoted the remainder of his life 
to the task, in large measure relating what he had himself seen 
and heard. His narrative is a grave and dignified handling of a 
great theme, but it is the work of a whole-hearted admirer. 
He loves his old master with rare intensity. There are no 
shadows in the picture, no hints of censure in the hour of defeat. 
The Emperor was baffled in 1812 by the burning of Moscow, 
which was an act of barbarians, and by the exceptional winter, 
which no one could foresee. At Leipzig, Germany, like Spain 
before her, was spurred to revolt by English gold and the un- 
sleeping hate of the Coalition. He believes that his master was 
beaten by the Cabinets, not by the peoples of Europe. We breathe 
the atmosphere of the Imperial bulletins, and his bias is so naive 
that it ceases to be dangerous. A shorter but far more critical 
work was written a few years later by Armand Lefebvre, 3 whose 
father had been commissioned by the Restoration Government 
to relate the diplomatic history of the Interregnum. He col- 
lected a good deal of material, but died before he was able to 
make use of it, and his son continued his labours. He respects 
Pitt and Nelson, and realises the folly of the Emperor's attacks 
on the nationalities. He knew little of foreign sources, but 
his researches in the French Foreign Office constituted a real 
advance in Napoleonic study. 4 

1 Cp. the severe analysis in Croker's Essays on the French Revolution. 
- See Mignet's eloge in Portraits et Notices historiques, vol. ii., and 
Hausser's detailed review in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. i., 1869. 

3 See the review in Hausser, Ges. Schriften, vol. i. 

4 The Histoire de Napoleon of Baron de Norvins, published in 1824, was a 
mere panegyric. 



202 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. While Bignon and Lefebvre only investigated certain aspects 

XI of the Emperor's work, Thiers determined to survey his achieve- 
ments as a whole. He had had practical experience of adminis- 
tration and diplomacy. He had visited the battlefields of 
Germany, Italy and Spain. He had discussed Napoleonic 
finance with Baron Louis, and Napoleonic strategy with Jomini 
and Foy. He was familiar with the correspondence of the 
Emperor, his ministers and his police agents. The ' History of 
the Consulate and Empire ' is a work of a far higher order than 
the ' French Revolution,' and remains the most complete account 
of the greatest of historic men. The first seven volumes, bringing 
the story to Tilsit, appeared in the closing years of Louis Philippe. 
The First Consul emerges as the saviour of France alike on the 
battlefield and in the cabinet. ' His only motive at that time 
was to do good.' The conclusion of the Concordat, ' an admirable 
work, the finest of his achievements,' appears as a political idyll, 
the Pope and the First Consul as friends and colleagues. In his 
former work Thiers' sympathies had been on the side of popular 
government ; now, though despotism is never overtly applauded, 
the Bonapartist overshadows the Liberal. The explanation is 
to be found in a speech delivered in 1841. ' I love the Revolution 
because it is the regeneration of my country ; but had not Napo- 
leon saved it it would have been ruined.' Brumaire was 
necessary and therefore legitimate. The execution of Enghien 
was a deplorable accident, for only the sleep of Real prevented a 
reprieve. He is the ideal despot, fertile in resource and match- 
less in action, yet no stranger to humanity and pity. Royer- 
Collard caustically remarked that he had written the history of the 
Consulate as a man who would have liked to make it. In foreign 
policy the colours are no less brilliant. There was not a country, 
he declares, through which the French armies passed which did 
not in consequence become better and more enlightened. He has 
no condemnation for the treatment of the Queen of Prussia. A 
fleeting reference is made to the execution of Palm without 
naming him, and Eylau is described as a brilliant victory. Even 
the Continental System finds a champion. 

The volumes written during the Second Republic are largely 
devoted to the perfidious seizure of Spain, of which he provided 
the first clear and connected account. There is no justification 
for Lanfrey's remark that he only censured the war because it 
failed. His sympathies are wholly with the Spaniards. ' The 
people were led by truer feelings than the educated classes. 
They acted nobly in rejecting benefits offered by a strange hand.' 
He makes no attempt to screen their terrible excesses ; but 



THE POLITICAL SCHOOL 203 

the defence of Saragossa covers many sins. When the scene CHAP. 
shifts to Central Europe we find further evidence of a more XI 
independent attitude. He realises that the Germany of 1809 
is different from that of 1806, and he admits that the conduct 
of the conquerors made all Germans hate them. The Austrians 
were right to fight in 1809, and they fought in a new spirit. 
Thiers was one of the earliest victims of the new Brumaire, 
and the subjection of France made him more critical of the uncle 
and model of his enemy. ' Napoleon allowed himself to be led 
in all things beyond the bounds of reason.' He is no longer the 
sword of the Revolution, but a despot like other despots. With a 
glance at the Second Empire the historian laments the growing 
servility. He maintains that the Russian enterprise was equally 
indefensible from a political and military point of view. He is 
loud in his admiration of Alexander's noble pride and of the 
sublime patriotism of Moscow, and concludes his narrative 
with words of crushing severity. ' These tragic events resulted 
not from this or that mistake, but from the one great error in 
going to Russia at all. And in this error lay a greater — the 
desire to attempt everything against right, against the wishes 
of the peoples, without a thought for the blood with which he 
conquered.' The narrative of the uprising of Germany is less 
powerful. Thiers did not read German, and he had only the 
vaguest notion of the personalities and forces of the Wars of 
Liberation, While he dimly feels the greatness of Stein, his 
warmest admiration is reserved for Metternich, whom he met after 
the aged statesman had fallen from power. But when France is 
invaded his sympathy revives. After the return from Elba he 
presents the Emperor as a man of peace and a constitutionalist. 
In the Waterloo campaign he adopts the legends of St. Helena. 
Yet the work closes with a list of capital errors and an emphatic 
warning. ' Who could have foreseen that the sage of 1800 would 
be the madman of 1812 ? Yes, one could have foreseen it, 
remembering that omnipotence carries within itself an incurable 
malady. In this great career, where there is so much to teach 
soldiers, administrators and politicians, citizens must learn 
never to deliver their country to a single man.' 1 

In the celebrated preface to the twelfth volume, written in 
1855, Thiers explains the spirit in which he approached his 
task. ' I feel shame at the mere idea of doing an injustice, the 
more as I have myself been misjudged. To judge men fairly 
we must extinguish all passion in our souls and remember our 

1 Nisard declared Thiers' verdict too severe. Considerations sur la 
Revolution et Napoleon, 1S87. 



204 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, own weakness. ' The supreme need of the historian is intelligence. 
XI ' Whoever has clear insight into men and things possesses the 
true genius of history.' Can we accept the testimonial which 
the historian presents to himself ? Has he extinguished passion 
in his soul ? Have outward events left no mark on his work ? 
These questions are rarely answered as he would wish. ' Thiers,' 
said Lamartine, speaking for many other critics, ' is the accom- 
plice of fortune ; he only recognises the wrong when it is punished 
by failure.' The judgment of Lanfrey * is similar. ' His work 
is the epic of matter. He has no appreciation of moral forces. 
Tu ne reussis pas, done tu as tort — that is his whole philosophy.' 
If this be the verdict of a rival, we may safely assert that at times 
the glory of France was more to him than liberty or morality. 
Again the intelligence which he declared the key to history 
failed him in one of the crucial problems of his task. The rise 
of Napoleon the Little was to teach him that if despotism is to be 
resisted it must be resisted at the outset. 

Little as Thiers knew of Germany, his knowledge of England 
was still less, and one of the blots on his work is his failure to do 
justice to the policy of Pitt and the genius of Wellington. He 
knew little of foreign archives or of the researches of foreign 
scholars. He accepted without question Metternich's version of 
Austrian policy. His claims to technical knowledge of military 
affairs have not passed without challenge ; yet, though he is no 
professional like Segur or Napier, his vivid interest in war did 
much to win for his book its enduring" popularity. Thiers, 
remarked Lamartine, was as much predestined to relate the 
campaigns as Napoleon to undertake them. His treatment of 
finance has received more unqualified praise. On the other hand, 
we learn little of administration, still less of public opinion, 
religion or literature. 2 That a work in twenty volumes carries 
its readers to the end without fatigue and without impatience 
is a tribute as much to the style as to the subject. Thiers achieves 
his effects by perfect lucidity and mastery of detail. He will 
not praise the passage of the St. Bernard till he has measured 
the distances and calculated the depth of snow on the passes, the 
height of the mountains and the number of ammunition carts. 
On another page he declares that he has not hesitated to give 
the price of bread, soap and candles. ' The art of narrating in the 
degree he possesses it,' remarks Emile Ollivier, ' is more than 

1 ' L'Histoire du Consulat et de l'Empire,' in Etudes et Portraits politiqiies, 
1SS0. Cp. the able articles in the Edinburgh Review, April and July, 185S. 

2 By far the fullest and most authoritative criticism of his book is 
by Hausser, Ges. Schriften, vol. i. 352-580. 



THE POLITICAL SCHOOL 205 

talent — it is genius.' Sainte-Beuve never wearied in his admira- CHAP, 
tion. ' It is a rare satisfaction to read a series of volumes so easy XI 
and so full, where we are never met by a difficulty of thought 
or expression, and where we watch in comfort the spectacle of the 
greatest events.' The style is remarkably level. There are no 
purple patches. If it has a fault it is that it lacks accent and 
resonance. 

The ' Consulate and Empire ' must always occupy a prominent 
place in historiography. It was written by one of the foremost 
political figures of the century. It was among the main factors 
in the growth of the Napoleonic legend. Lamartine christened 
it the book of the century. Flint declared it perhaps the most 
interesting history ever written on the same scale, Remusat the 
most magnificent monument of contemporary literature. It was 
precisely because the book was a political event as well as a 
literary achievement that contemporaries found it difficult to 
criticise impartially. Lanfrey denied Thiers every quality of an 
historian. Charras and Quinet, who waged war against the 
Empire from beyond the frontier, attacked the volume on 
Waterloo. Jules Barni,i another exile, hurled his thunderbolts 
from the safe distance of Lausanne. The Comte de Martel 2 
devoted three volumes to proving that the historian was a char- 
latan and a liar. Count d'Haussonville pointed out the mistakes 
in the narrative of the Emperor's relations with the Church, 
Tocqueville curtly remarked that the history of the Empire 
was still to write, Taine that Thiers did not love truth. But 
critics and admirers agree that no work has ever given such 
an incalculable impetus to the study of the Napoleonic era. 

1 Napoleon ei son historien, M. Thiers, 1869. 

2 Thiers, un historien fantaisisle, 1883-7. For a sketch of this curious 
man see Masson, ' Un Explorateur d'Archives,' in Jadis, vol. ii. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE MIDDLE AGES AND THE ANCIEN REGIME 



CHAP. A lively interest in the mediaeval history of France was aroused 
XII by Thierry and Barante, Guizot and Michelet ; but its systematic 
study owes most to the Ecole des Chartes.i The idea of a school 
where savants could train young students emanated from De 
Gerando in 1820, and a royal decree was signed approving the 
proposal ' to assist the Academy of Inscriptions in its labours.' 
A dozen students joined, but the institution soon flickered out. 
Revived in 1829, its fortunes steadily improved, and a journal 
was established. It was largely from among its alumni that 
editors have been found for the ' Documents Inedits ' and 
contributors to the ' Histoire litteraire de la France.' The work 
of Dom Rivet had reached the twelfth volume in 1763, bringing 
the narrative to 1167, but was then discontinued for lack of 
interest and only resumed under Napoleon. The scholarship 
improved when Victor Le Clerc 3 succeeded Daunou as chief 
director. On reaching the fourteenth century, he undertook a 
preliminary survey of its literature and science, its political and 
social conditions, following the example of Dom Rivet for the 
twelfth and Daunou for the thirteenth. With the exception of 
the founder no one has rendered such services to the great 
national enterprise as Le Clerc, who not only wrote largely 
himself but trained younger scholars of the calibre of Renan 
and Haureau to aid him in his formidable task. 

No one produced more enduring work on the Middle Ages 
in the second quarter of the century than Guerard, 3 one of the 
earliest pupils and later a teacher and Director of the Ecole 

1 See Livret de l'£cole des Chartes, 1821-91, 1891. 

2 See Renan' s charming sketch of his master in M Manges d' Histoire et 
de Voyage, 1878. 

3 See N. de Wailly's Notice sur Guerard, 1855. 



MIDDLE AGES AND A NCI EN REGIME 207 

des Chartes. His life-work was to edit the Chartularies of the CHAP. 
great Abbeys ; and the Polyptique of the Abbot Irminon won XII 
him European fame. The Polyptique contained full details 
of the vast estates of the monastery of St. Germain-des-Pres in 
the time of Charles the Great, and threw a bright light on the 
relations of classes and the methods of land-holding. The com- 
prehensive Introduction is one of the glories of French scholarship. 
Guerard traces the growth of political and social institutions, 
the condition of persons and lands, from the German invasions. 
He rejects the contention that Gaul was civilised and regenerated 
by the Frank invaders, against whom he draws a severe indict- 
ment. He traces the manor to Roman legislation, and maintains 
that the framework of Roman society and administration 
remained erect till the collapse of the Carolingian Empire. 
Reprinted in an abridged form in 1896, it shares with Guizot's 
lectures the merit of being the most important contribution to 
the study of early France produced in the first half of the nine- 
teenth century. 

Among the most brilliant medievalists of a younger generation 
was Quicherat, 1 who, after passing through Michelet's lecture- 
room, learned more exact methods at the Ecole des Chartes. It 
was mainly at his suggestion that the School undertook the 
foundation of a journal, of which he was the first editor. Deeply 
impressed by Michelet's picture of Joan of Arc he collected the 
sources of her trial. The five volumes of material, with copious 
notes and explanations, were followed by a short but masterly 
study of the heroine. The complete work revealed Joan in full 
detail, and provided a model for the critical handling of mediaeval 
sources. He was also the founder of mediaeval archaeology. 
A Chair of French Archaeology was founded for him at the Ecole 
des Chartes in 1847, and his lectures created an extraordinary 
impression. His knowledge of the monuments and antiquities 
of France was unrivalled. The world of scholarship impatiently 
waited for a comprehensive work, and Michelet, to whom literary 
production was no effort, continually but vainly urged his old 
pupil forward. Yet his authority was none the less uncontested 
because he could point to no imposing treatise. 

With the death of Quicherat in 1882 the primacy among 
French mediaevalists passed to Leopold Delisle, 2 an alumnus of 
the Ecole des Chartes and a pupil and friend of Guerard. 

1 Seethe notice prefixed to his Melanges d'Archeologie et d'Histoire, 
vol. i., 1885, and Giry's appreciation in Revue Historique, vol. xvii. 

2 See Quarterly Review, April, 191 1, and Poole's tribute read to the 
British Academy, 191 1. 



2o8 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. Appointed to the manuscript department of the Imperial Library 
XI1 in 1852 he became its head in 1874. For sixty years he poured 
forth a never-ending stream of publications. Supreme in palaeo- 
graphy, diplomatic and criticism, he threw light on every part 
of the French Middle Ages. Though his chief task was the cata- 
loguing and editing of the treasures in his keeping, he contributed 
to the ' Histoire litteraire ' and occasionally produced monographs, 
among them his well-known study of the Norman peasantry in 
the thirteenth century. Though only a name to the great public, 
Delisle was reverenced by scholars all over the world as the doyen 
of medievalists. His editions of the Acts of Philip Augustus 
and of the Gascon rolls were recognised as models by younger 
men. His eightieth birthday evoked international homage, 
and a bibliography of his writings was compiled. In 1905 
he was harshly dismissed from his post, but found refuge 
among the treasures of Chantilly. At the age of eighty- 
three, the year before his death, he published a massive 
Introduction to a collection of charters of Henry II relating to 
France. 

Of scholars whose output roughly begins with the foundation 
of the Third Republic a few may be mentioned. Trained by 
Waitz and himself a specialist in Merovingian sources, Gabriel 
Monod ! laid every student of history under an abiding obligation 
by the foundation of the Revue Historique in 1876. Among the 
chief contributors was Auguste Molinier, 2 whose first great 
achievement was the revision of the massive Benedictine history 
of Languedoc. An immense number of new documents were 
added, and the long excursuses of the editor form the most 
valuable part of the work which, in its new as in its original form, 
is an indispensable instrument of the medievalist. His lectures 
at the Ecole des Chartes, of which he was an old student, formed 
the basis of his volumes on French mediaeval sources, the accuracy 
and completeness of which render them a priceless possession. 
The Introduction, which fills a large part of the fifth volume and 
was the author's last work, presents a concise but masterly 
survey of the evolution of historical composition, criticism 
and instruction in France. Of scarcely less importance was the 
achievement of Giry. 3 Educated at the Ecole des Chartes he 
turned his attention to the Communes, correcting the views of 
Thierry on the origin and development of municipal institutions. 
Recognising the endless diversity of circumstance, he cautiously 
avoids making kings or lords the systematic protectors or enemies 

1 See the obituary in Revue Historique, vol. ex. 

2 Ibid., vol. lxxxv. 3 Ibid., vol. lxxii, 



MIDDLE AGES AND A NCI EN REGIME 209 

of town liberties, and his monographs on St. Omer and Rouen CHAP, 
are models of research. His later years were chiefly devoted to XII 
diplomatic, and his Manual is the most useful introduction to that 
difficult subject in any language. By his lectures at the Ecole 
des Hautes Etudes, founded by Duruy in 1868, and at the Ecole 
des Chartes, Giry exerted a wide influence, and most French 
medievalists of to-day have passed through his school. An 
irreparable loss to mediseval studies was the death of Julian 
Havet 1 at the age of forty. French scholarship can boast of 
no more remarkable feat than his discovery that a number 
of documents on which historians of the Merovingian era had 
confidently relied were forgeries. 

The most conspicuous if not the greatest of medievalists of 
the latter half of the century was Fustel de Coulanges. 2 He 
was one of the first students at the French School at Athens, and 
after the phenomenal success of ' La Cite Antique ' it would have 
been natural for him to have continued to work in the field of 
antiquity ; but he was eager to trace the connections between 
the classical and the Teutonic world. His articles on Justice 
in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, which appeared in 1871 in the 
Revue des Deux Mondes, indicated the direction of his thought. 
In 1872, at the age of forty-two, he launched a thunderbolt in 
the pages of the same review. The German invasions of the 
fifth century, he declared, had no direct influence on the history, 
religion, customs, government or structure of society. The 
barbarians brought nothing but confusion, and their arrival 
simply favoured the development of the feudalism already 
existing in germ. Modern aristocracy was based on territorial 
feudalism, which only arose after the distinction of races had 
disappeared. In 1875 he published the first instalment of a 
' History of the Institutions of Ancient France/ hoping to follow 
it with a volume on feudalism, another on royalty and the States- 
General, and a fourth on absolute monarchy. But the storm of 
criticism that greeted it convinced him that he must make sure 
of his foundations before building his house. Thus began the 
monumental work which occupied his every thought for the rest 
of his life. Hitherto he had rather stated conclusions than 
proved them. He would now make each chapter a dissertation, 

1 See the sketch by his brother Louis prefixed to his CEuvres, vol. i., 
1896. 

3 See Guiraud's excellent volume, Fustel de Coulanges, 1906 ; Sorel, 
Notes et Portraits, 1909 ; Herbert Fisher, Eng. Hist. Review, January 
1890 ; Monod, Revue Historique, vol. xli. Arbois de Jubainville hotly 
attacks him in his Deux Manieres d'ecrire VHistoire, 1896. Kehr's article 
in Historische Zeitschrift, vol. lxxi., is typical of German depreciation. 

P 



210 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, setting forth his proofs in full. The enlarged work dealt with 

XII Roman Gaul, the German invasions, Merovingian institutions, 

and the lands. The fifth and sixth volumes, left unfinished at his 

death and edited by his pupil, Camille Jullian, were dedicated 

to vassalage and Carolingian institutions. 

Fustel's views were set forth with crystal clearness and 
extraordinary power. Gaul fell an easy prey to Rome and 
never revolted, for Rome was the higher civilisation. But the 
fourth century witnessed the growth of a powerful aristocracy, 
while the middle classes fell into poverty and the central 
authority began to crumble. Power passed to the great land- 
owners, who could neither fight nor govern. At this moment 
began the Frank invasions, due to the break up of old German 
institutions and in general to the absence of fixed habits and 
ideas. The Franks brought nothing of their own, for they had 
nothing to bring. Their institutions, as Sybel had contended, 
were derived from Rome. The invasion was not a conquest but 
a pacific settlement of Romanised Germans. The Gallo-Romans 
were neither reduced to serfdom nor treated as inferiors. The 
Kings were the heirs of the Emperors and aped their ways, 
absolute over Franks and Gauls alike ; but little real change 
occurred. The cities were unmolested and the taxes but slightly 
modified. Three-quarters of the Merovingian regime was a 
continuation of the Lower Empire. Germanists, he declared, 
had overlooked the witness of Rome and read Teutonic evidence 
with national prepossessions. All the agricultural characteristics 
of the manor existed under the Empire and were plainly apparent 
in Merovingian times. But though the invasion itself changed 
but little, it was followed by momentous transformations. 
Feudalism arose in the organisation of property and individual 
relations. A new method of holding property appeared in the 
beneficium, a relation not established by law but arising privately, 
and society was modified by the dependence of free men on one 
another, often for the sake of protection. Thus aristocracy 
grew, and with the decay of the Carolingian power it became 
supreme. The Franks were not the authors of the change, but 
they aided it and gave it some traits that it would not have had. 
For instance the judicial system of Frankish Gaul was German, 
and the comitatus favoured the growth of feudal relations. ' I 
am both German and Roman,' he declared, ' or rather, I am 
neither.' 

The attacks on his conclusions caused Fustel to elaborate his 
historic method. All his works, he declared, derived from the 
Discours sur la Methode. All opinions about history, he added, 



MIDDLE AGES AND ANCIEN REGIME 211 

even those most generally held, must be regarded with suspicion ; CHAP, 
and the historian must approach his task not only without XII 
presuppositions, but without working hypotheses. The second 
step is to go straight to the texts. The researches of other 
scholars may conceivably be of use, but are more likely to lead 
the student astray. Historical science is the interpretation of 
documents, for which an unbiassed mind and a mastery of the 
language of the originals are sufficient. In the next place, the 
historian must look at things as contemporaries saw them, not 
as they appear to the modern mind ; and his readers should never 
know if he is republican or monarchist, liberal or reactionary. 
He must explain things, but not attempt to judge their value or 
discover their ultimate causes. Race, climate, Providence, are 
mere counters, not coin of the realm. He rejects the notion that 
a nation's destinies are fixed in advance. We see the concrete 
changes and explain how one state of society is transformed into 
another. Beyond lies the frontier between history and specula- 
tion. This rigorous limitation of aim is at once his strength 
and his weakness. His concentration on the original authorities 
of a period in which they are so scanty that they can be mastered 
by a single mind gave him an easy mastery within the confines 
of his subject ; and his profound acquaintance with Roman 
history was an initial advantage. He boasted of being the only 
man who had studied every Latin text from the sixth century 
B.C. to the tenth century of the Christian era. Most of his critics 
avoided coming to close quarters with him, for he was always 
ready with an army of texts. He possessed an almost unique 
power of grouping facts round a central contention. He is, 
moreover, a great literary artist, though he regarded praise of 
his style as something like a reflection on his science. ' His 
words possessed a geometrical rigour,' declares his pupil and 
biographer Guiraud of his lectures ; ' it was the eloquence of the 
savant, indeed of the mathematician, abstract without being 
arid, sparing in images and rich in formulae. The heart was not 
touched, the mind was not charmed ; but the intelligence was 
utterly satisfied.' His books are of a similar character — simple, 
severe and of lapidary precision. He opened up fresh veins of 
inquiry and touched nothing that he did not renew. 

The faults of his method are as obvious as its merits. His 
Cartesian doubt went beyond a mere suspense and often led him 
to start with a bias against current conceptions. ' He delights 
in a sort of aristocratic isolation,' complained Monod, ' and feels 
that he has only grasped a thing when he sees it differently from 
his predecessors.' He used to say, ' I am Guerard's pupil ' ; 



212 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, and Guerard was the only scholar for whom he felt real respect. 
XII In the second place he vastly under-estimated the difficulty of 
arriving at historical truth. He believed history to be an ob- 
jective science, the secrets of which could be extracted by the 
same methods as were adopted in the physical sciences. To 
collect, interpret and compare the whole of the original texts 
must, he believed, lead to conclusions on which there could be 
no controversy. ' Do not applaud me,' he said one day to an 
enthusiastic audience, ' it is not I that speak to you but history 
that speaks by my mouth.' He regarded his results as inde- 
pendent of himself, and criticism as something like blasphemy. 
The dissent of competent scholars never led him to modify his 
conviction not only that h e had reached the truth but that truth 
was easy to reach. But before the interpretation of texts is com- 
menced we must establish their authenticity. ' Fustel,' wrote 
Arbois de Jubainville, ' had not the most elementary notions of 
diplomatic. A large number of Merovingian charters were forged 
by Jerome Vignier in the seventeenth century, and when Julien 
Havet showed that some of those he had used were forgeries, 
Fustel replied that false charters were almost as useful as real, 
since the forger copied the rules.' Even his treatment of authen- 
tic sources has been challenged, and Monod has shown that he 
once gave a text three different meanings. Again he forgot 
that the interpretation of texts and technical terms demanded 
knowledge of juristic conceptions. He failed to realise that 
the light from the texts leaves great spaces of time and whole 
groups of problems in shadow. As he only studied a limited 
period and area, pronounces Brunner, he often misunderstood 
the sources ; and Kehr declares that he never appreciated 
Germanic law. 

Was Fustel so entirely without personal prepossessions as 
he supposed ? Critics have hinted at a connection between the 
date when he reached his conclusions and the conclusions them- 
selves. His post at Strassburg, an outpost of France, gave 
him a special interest in the problem of Franco-German relations, 
and when the war came he compiled a pamphlet on the French 
claims to Alsace. When the struggle was over he wrote a stinging 
article on the methods of German historians, whom he roundly 
accused of sacrificing truth to racial and dynastic passions. 
For half a century, he declared, French historians had praised 
Germany, had contrasted the chastity of the Germans of Tacitus 
with the corruption of the Gauls, had hailed the Frankish invasion 
as a blast of pure, bracing air. They blamed the invasion of Italy 
by Charles VIII and the ambition of Louis XIV. The royalist 



MIDDLE AGES AND A NCI EN REGIME 213 

historian depreciated the nineteenth century and the republican CHAP, 
disparaged the Ancien Regime. German historians, on the other XII 
hand, were an organised army of patriots. Science was a means 
to an end, and that end the glorification of the fatherland. ' We 
shall continue to profess that erudition has no fatherland. But 
we live to-day in an epoch of war, and it is almost impossible 
for scholarship to retain its former serenity. Can we be blamed 
for defending ourselves ? ' The historian who wrote such words 
on the morrow of the invasion may well have had a subconscious 
bias in discussing the early relations of Gauls and Germans ; 
but an examination of the manuscript of his courses before 1870 
reveals that his main positions had already been reached. 
A further criticism is suggested by the complete exclusion of 
individuals from his field of vision. Almost the only recognition 
of personality in his chief work is a passing reference to the 
feebleness of the later Merovingian rulers. His interest is in 
institutions, not in life. His fame as a suggestive teacher is 
secure ; but his results are nowhere accepted in their entirety, 
and his structure does not compare in solidity with the edifice 
in which Brunner has traced the development of early German 
society and law. 

The study of French mediaeval institutions has been eagerly 
pursued ; but most of the investigations have related to a 
period subsequent to that which Fustel described. In a work 
of rare erudition and originality Flach has traced the growth 
of feudalism, or, as he prefers to call it, the seigneurial regime, 
which resulted from the anarchy following the fall of the Caro- 
lingians. Before that time, he declares, there were lords but 
not vassals. While Flach's chief object was to depict the 
growth and relation of classes, Luchaire explored the early 
Capetian monarchy, which he proved from the charters to be 
essentially absolute. A masterly survey of the evolution of 
French institutions has been undertaken by Paul Viollet, 
Guilhiermoz has investigated the origin of the noblesse, and 
Picot has related in detail the history of the States-General. 
Luce explored the history of the Hundred Years' War, Perrens 
wrote the first adequate life of Etienne Marcel, Delachenal is 
at work on Charles V, De Beaucourt compiled a monumental 
history of Charles VII. Of general histories none have approached 
the opening volumes of Michelet in brilliance and suggestion. 
The early editions of Henri Martin were largely spoilt by the 
exaggerated influence which he attributed to the Druids ; and 
he was never profoundly interested in the Middle Ages. All 
previous narratives have been superseded by the co-operative 



214 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, history of France which has appeared under the editorship of 
XII Lavisse. 

Welcome light has been thrown on the Middle Ages by 
scholars who are not strictly historians. Haureau traced the 
evolution of scholasticism. Jourdain investigated the influence 
of Aristotle. Renan analysed the publicists of the time of 
Philippe le Bel. The history of literature has been related 
in the co-operative work of Petit de Julleville. The epics and 
romances of chivalry were explored and popularised by Leon 
Gautier and Paul Meyer. But the greatest name in mediaeval 
scholarship outside the bounds of political history is that of 
Gaston Paris, 1 who succeeded his father at the College de France 
in 1872. His doctor's thesis on the legend of Charlemagne at 
once became a classic, and by his editions of romances, his 
contributions to the ' Histoire Litteraire,' and his literary sur- 
veys he became the guide of generations of students. Romance 
philology, created by Diez, was enlarged and vivified by Gaston 
Paris, the Lachmann of France. He learned the chronological 
development of the language so exactly that when he knew the 
date of a work he could restore the primitive forms where 
they had been altered by copyists. 



II 

The Ancien Regime presents grave difficulties to the French 
historian, owing to its connection with the battles of his own 
time. The republican freethinker cannot always do justice 
to an epoch of political and ecclesiastical autocracy, while the 
Catholic royalist has a tendency to gloss over the failings of 
the Absolute Monarchy. But these temptations are losing 
their power day by day. 3 

The sixteenth century has been far less studied than its 
successors. The volumes in which Paulin Paris two generations 
ago attempted to defend Francis I are only a sketch, and no 
adequate history of the reign exists. The letters of Catherine 
de Medici have been collected, but she still awaits a competent 
biographer. Baron de Ruble has woven the history of the 
wars of religion round the careers of Antoine de Bourbon and 
Jeanne d'Albret, enriching his pages with copious extracts 

1 See Ker, Essays on Medieval Literature, 1905, and Monod's notice in 
Revue Historique, vol. lxxxii. 

2 Caron et Sagnac, L'Etat actuel des Etudes d' Histoire modeme en France, 
1902, contains useful material. 



MIDDLE AGES AND ANCIEN REGIME 215 

from the archives of Simancas and Pau. Weill has analysed the CHAP. 
political doctrines which emerged during the fierce struggle. XII 
Poirson's 1 well-known volumes are still of use as the fullest 
summary of the reign of Henri IV. Though writing half a 
century ago the author contented himself with the printed 
material, on the ground that if he were to dive into the archives 
his book would never be finished. The King appears as the 
greatest of the Politiques, the restorer of France to her position 
among the Powers, the skilful administrator, the fosterer of 
agriculture and industry, the patron of art, literature and 
science. No room is found in the four stout volumes of panegyric 
to deal with the peccadilloes of the man, and there is a tendency 
to depict the King as too liberal, too constitutional, too modern. 
A masterly survey of part of the ground has appeared in Fagniez's 
study of agriculture and industry under the fostering hand of 
Sully and his master. The most valuable contribution to 
the religious life of the century has come from the Society for 
the History of French Protestantism, founded in 1851. In its 
Bulletin, in the collection of the correspondence of the French 
reformers and in ' La France Protestante,' the invaluable 
biographical dictionary of the brothers Haag, are to be found 
treasures beyond price. 

The seventeenth century has received far more attention 
than any other part of the Ancien Regime. A careful summary 
of the reign of Louis XIII, based only on printed sources, was 
published by Bazin in 1838. More than a generation later 
Berthold Zeller, employing the reports of the Tuscan ambassadors 
preserved at Florence and other new sources, reconstructed its 
opening years, bringing the narrative to the moment when 
Richelieu succeeded the Queen Mother as the ruler of France. 
Batiffol is now giving us a new Louis XIII — a man of resolution 
and resource, tenaciously attached to his royal prerogatives. 
Richelieu has formed the theme of two works of outstanding 
importance. After devoting many years to editing his Letters 
and Papers, Avenel wrote a detailed study of the Cardinal ; 
but his volumes make no pretence to a complete picture of the 
most illustrious of French statesmen. He omits the foreign 
policy, which he considers admirable, and confines himself to 
the internal administration, which he judges with great severity. 
When Richelieu was called to the helm there were at least some 
traces of liberty in France, some traditions of independence ; 
when he died he had founded a choking absolutism on the ruins 
of the noblesse. 

1 See Sainte-Beuve, Causeries, vol. xiii. 



216 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. A few years later Hanotaux commenced a more ambitious 

XII work. Trained in the Ecole des Chartes the young scholar's 
first articles related to the Middle Ages ; but on becoming an 
archivist in the Foreign Office he transferred his affections to 
modern history. The first volume of the ' History of Richelieu ' 
appeared in 1893, the preface announcing that he had already 
laboured fifteen years at his task. The drama opens with a 
detailed account of the first thirty years of the life of the 
hero, his family, his theological studies, his relations with 
Cardinal Du Perron, with the saintly Berulle and with 
Pere Joseph, his energetic administration of his diocese, culmin- 
ating in a brilliant picture of the young Bishop at the meeting 
of the States-General in 1614. Arrived at his entry on the 
public stage the historian presents his readers with an elaborate 
survey of the state of France in 1614 — Paris and the provinces, 
the monarchy and the administration, the finances, justice, the 
army, the States-General, the provincial assemblies, municipal 
life and liberties, the Protestants, the noblesse, the lawyers, the 
bourgeoisie, the peasantry. It is a grandly conceived vestibule, 
ranking withMichelet'ssurveyof mediaeval France and Macaulay's 
third chapter among the masterpieces of descriptive sociology. 
The second volume brings the narrative down to 1624, when 
Richelieu became the uncrowned King of France. At this 
moment the historian became Foreign Minister, and when he 
regained his leisure he turned his attention to the Third Republic. 
The work remains a fragment ; but it has advanced far enough 
for the author's general conception of the Cardinal's character 
to emerge. He depicts him not only as practical, positive and 
cool, but as accessible and straightforward. Michelet's Cardinal 
is a sphinx ; the hero of Hanotaux is a man of simple psychology, 
direct in thought not less than decisive in action. Every historian 
of the monarchy must pronounce on its governing principle of 
centralisation. Avenel, following Tocqueville, found in it the 
germ of decay. Hanotaux, following Henri Martin, envisages 
it as the matrix in which the unity of the nation was achieved. 
Light has been thrown on almost every aspect of Richelieu's 
personality and career by Fagniez's monumental work on P£re 
Joseph. Hitherto known only as the Cardinal's shadow, the base 
intriguer of De Vigny's ' Cinq Mars,' he appears not only as a 
skilful diplomatist but as a man of high character and lofty 
imagination. While never dominating Richelieu's policy he 
was as much a collaborator as an agent, though he always 
preferred to work behind the scenes. While the Cardinal's mind 
was essentially secular and his first thought was the greatness of 



MIDDLE AGES AND A NCI EN REGIME 217 

France, the monk was a mystic and his governing principle CHAP. 
was the greatness of the Church. Eager to eject the Turks from XII 
Europe, to convert the Protestants, to suppress Jansenism, he 
saw in a powerful monarchy the instrument by which his religious 
projects might be realised. Before his best friend the Cardinal 
wears no mask, and we catch glimpses of human weakness and 
weariness that his contemporaries never suspected. 

While Richelieu's greatness was a living tradition it is only 
recently that the figure of his successor has been revealed in its 
true proportions. The disgust of Saint-Simon was typical of 
French feeling towards the man who was at once a foreigner, the 
enemy of the noblesse and one of the most rapacious ministers 
of modern times. That a juster view now prevails of the man 
whom Richelieu thought worthy to succeed him is mainly due 
to Cheruel, 1 who edited his correspondence and wrote the history 
of his administration. Though there is no taint of hero-worship 
in his pages, Cheruel shows how largely he prepared the power 
and splendour of France under Louis XIV. He pronounces his 
external policy successful and glorious, his internal policy 
remarkable for his victorious conflict with a turbulent aristocracy. 
No attempt is made to render his personal character attractive 
or to deny his shameless greed. A more brilliant picture of the 
stormy years when Mazarin ruled France is presented in the 
Due d Aumale's 2 history of the Conde princes. When the fall 
of Louis Philippe and the coup d'etat of 1851 barred the way to 
further public service for his sons, the Duke resolved to employ 
his leisure in research. On the first two volumes being printed 
the whole edition was seized at the binder's. The embargo was 
removed in 1867, and when the offending work appeared the 
world learned that it was only the author's name that was danger- 
ous. The remaining volumes appeared at intervals, the seventh 
and last in 1895. The latter half of the book was devoted to the 
life of the great Conde. The author's experience of war gives 
permanent value to his judgments on Conde's campaigns, and 
the battle-pictures of Rocroy, Fribourg, Lens and the Faubourg 
St. Antoine are masterpieces of realisation. The work was 
completed at Chantilly after the return from his second exile, 
surrounded by memories of the Prince and his literary friends ; 
but the Duke's admiration for his hero does not blind him to the 
indefensible character of the Second Fronde. 

The later years of Louis XIII and the troubled times of the 

1 See Rocquain's eloge in his Notes et Fragments d'Histoire, 1906. 
• See Picot's admirable eloge, 1897, E. Daudet's biography, 1898. and 
the Correspondance du Due d'Aumale et de Cuvillier-Fleury, 1910-1912, 



2i8 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. Fronde occupied the last two decades of Cousin's x long and 
XII laborious life. His discovery of the text of Pascal's Pensees in 
1843 led him to the exquisite personality of his sister, and sug- 
gested a series of studies of famous women of the generation that 
preceded the personal rule of Louis XIV. The most attractive 
of his portraits after Jacqueline Pascal is Madame de Hautefort. 
At once the object of the Platonic affection of the King, the friend 
of the Queen and the enemy of Richelieu, she had a difficult 
part to play ; but she never thought of her own interests. A 
very different type is Madame de Chevreuse, who loved intrigue 
not less than Madame de Hautefort hated it, and who with the 
energy and determination of a man engaged in repeated plots 
against Richelieu. On a throne she would have been an Elizabeth 
or a Catherine. The most notable of the portraits was Madame 
de Longueville, the sister of Conde. The aged philosopher was 
twitted with playing the part of cavaliere servente to the fair 
sinner ; but though he admires her beauty and her wit, he never 
conceals his disapproval of her conduct. He intended to devote 
no less than four volumes to her life ; but only two were written, 
the first dealing with her youth, the second with her life during 
the Fronde. The story of her retreat and penitence in Port 
Royal was never told. La Rochefoucauld cynically confessed 
that he only seduced her in order to gain the influence of Conde, 
and it was by her lover that she was beguiled into the Fronde. 
Once engaged her hatred of Mazarin was implacable. Through- 
out his works Cousin deals severely with the factious nobility, 
and, though no lover of absolutism, sides with the monarchy 
and its loyal servants against their enemies. 

Cousin's heroines touch Mazarin at so many points that he 
dallied with the idea of writing the life of the great minister. 
He published a series of articles in the Journal des Savants on 
his Carnets or note-books, which he was the first to anaryse, 
and devoted a volume to the unknown period of his youth. The 
picture of the soldier who lived by gambling and of the eccle- 
siastic who never became a priest was not attractive ; but it 
revealed the man who impressed Richelieu in 1630, at which 
point the narrative ends. In addition to his political studies, he 
threw light on the literary society. Madame de Scudery's once 
famous romance, ' Le Grand Cyrus,' published in ten volumes 
between 1649 an d I 654> had become a mere name when he dis- 
interred a key to its characters. Cyrus himself was Conde, while 
Madame de Longueville and the other leading figures of the Court 

1 See Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire's great biography, esp. vol. ii., 178-256, 
1895. 



MIDDLE AGES AND ANCIEN REGIME 219 

played their part in the drama. Armed with his discovery the CHAP, 
historian summarises the information supplied by this forgotten XII 
witness. A final vignette was Madame de Sable, the author of 
maxims which inspired La Rochefoucauld and of portraits which 
anticipate La Bruyere. Turning to history late in life his works 
were naturally imperfect ; but the fierce attack of Taine * has 
had no echoes. Cousin, declared his young critic, offered rhe- 
torical commonplaces in stilted language. He worshipped the 
seventeenth century, but failed to convey the spirit of the epoch. 
He had not even an eye for character. Compared with Sainte- 
Beuve's ' Port Royal,' his volumes were only a collection of 
material. The onslaught lost much of its effect by appearing in 
the book in which the young materialist struck with all his 
force at the Eclectic school of which Cousin was the head. 

The reign of Louis XIV, which for practical purposes began 
with the death of Mazarin, has rarely been presented as a panora- 
mic whole. The first critical student of the reign was Lemontey, 2 
whose ' Essai sur l'etablissement monarchique de Louis XIV ' 
contained an admirable study of the monarch and his adminis- 
tration. He emphasised the discipline and vigour of the govern- 
ment, the industry and ability of the king ; but the reign 
exhibited all the evils of absolute power. Half a century later the 
first comprehensive attempt since Voltaire was made by Campar- 
don ; but his knowledge was superficial, and his Catholic sym- 
pathies led him to defend the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. 
No further attempt at a synthesis was made by a competent 
scholar till Lavisse 3 reviewed the epoch in his co-operative history 
of France. ' Le Roi Soleil ' fails to dazzle his latest biographer. 
Rejecting Saint-Simon's systematic depreciation he pronounces 
the King a man of ordinary intelligence. His Spanish blood 
revealed itself in his love of etiquette, his devotion to the forms 
of religion, his dream of world-empire. It was his misfortune 
that while taught war and diplomacy he received no instruction 
in administration. His best quality was his love of work. He 
thoroughly understood the army and foreign affairs, and knew 
more of Europe than any of his advisers. He was not a bad 
man ; but he used up France, and the supreme condemnation of 
his work is the fall of the monarchy in 1789. Colbert is depicted 
as ambitious, unscrupulous, often base, though the grandeur 

1 Les Philosophes Classiques. 

- In vol. v. of his CEuvres, 1829. Vol. i. contains a brief biography of 
the historian. 

3 There is a good sketch of Lavisse in Doumic, ticfivains d'aujourdhui, 
1894. 



220 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, of his aims is recognised. ' If the monarchy could, have been 
XII saved, Colbert would have saved it.' He alone saw the need of 
fundamental changes, and protested against the King's extra- 
vagance. Lavisse's volumes, written more in sorrow than in 
anger, form melancholy reading. Crediting Louvois with 
administrative capacity, he sharply condemns his harshness and 
selfishness. The full treatment of religious life and thought — 
Jansenism, Gallicanism and Protestantism — of culture, of 
administration and finance, of trade and industry adds to the 
value of one of the most authoritative works in French historical 
literature. 

For detailed knowledge of the reign we must turn to 
biographies and monographs. Cheruel's volumes on Fouquet 
display his usual research and judgment. Camille Rousset's 
voluminous biography of Louvois, based on the documents in the 
War Office, defends the fame of the War Minister whom Saint- 
Simon detested as the evil genius of the King. Segur's volumes 
on Luxemburg, le tapissier de Notre-Dame, have recovered 
one of the most brilliant figures of a brilliant age. Legrelle 
triumphantly accomplished the arduous task, which Mignet 
left unfinished, of tracing the history of the long negotiations 
relative to the Spanish Succession. The Due de Noailles and 
Lavallee made it possible to admire Madame de Maintenon. 
Count d'Haussonville, in a work equally distinguished by scholar- 
ship and literary charm, has explored the relations between 
France and Savoy and traced an exquisite portrait of the Duchess 
of Burgundy, who illuminated the dull Court of the aged monarch 
with the warmth and radiance of a sunbeam. 

Historians of Louis XIV possess a special advantage and face 
a peculiar difficulty in Saint-Simon. Already known by short 
extracts the Memoirs appeared in 1829, and for a generation 
exerted an almost hypnotic influence. The position of the author 
at Court, his intimate acquaintance with its leading figures, 
the unparalleled fullness of detail, the extraordinary power of 
observation, the wonderful gallery of portraits and the unflagging 
vivacity of style render it difficult to envisage the Grand Mon- 
arque except through his spectacles. Yet he was a passionate 
partisan, and his pages record his undying resentment against 
' the bastards,' their royal father, Madame de Maintenon and all 
who espoused their cause. We owe it chiefly to three scholars that 
his authority has been overthrown. In a brief but masterly 
analysis Ranke measured his prejudices and emphasised the 
superior value of strictly contemporary information. A far more 
detailed study was made by Cheruel, the editor of the first critical 



MIDDLE AGES AND ANCIEN REGIME 221 

text, who showed how many of his anecdotes were contradicted CHAP, 
by contemporary records and how many of his portraits needed XII 
correction. Finally Boislisle devoted his life to a monumental 
edition which, though interrupted by death before the Regency 
is reached, is one of the glories of French historical scholarship. 
Utilising the voluminous papers of Saint-Simon published in 
1880, he not only supplied a commentary but added a mass of 
material illustrating every aspect of the time. Though his 
work is little known to the great public, his researches recon- 
structed the machinery of the central government and form 
perhaps the most valuable contribution to our knowledge of the 
reign ever made by a single scholar. 

The rise and fall of Jansenism has been narrated in the most 
perfect work ever written on France in the seventeenth century. 
Sainte-Beuve 1 chose the saints and scholars of Port-Royal for 
his theme when invited to deliver lectures at Lausanne in 1837. 
The austere piety of the Jansenists had a good deal in common 
with the spiritual Protestantism of Vinet, of whom the great 
critic said that he helped him to understand the inner meaning of 
the movement. Eighty-one lectures were written in six months 
and read from manuscript ; but the publication lasted nearly 
twenty years. The first two volumes were little more than a 
revision of the lectures ; but the last three were almost a new 
work. He had been led very close to the portals of the Catholic 
Church by Lamennais ; but when the master broke with Rome 
and lost his faith, the pupil lapsed into life-long scepticism. 
None the less he approached Jansenism in a friendly and almost 
a reverent spirit, describing it as an attempt to return to the 
primitive Church. He quotes with approval Royer-Collard's 
dictum, ' He who knows not Port-Royal knows not humanity.' 
He shows how Port-Royal put a stamp upon its inmates, how 
it became itself a collective individuality. Saint-Cyran and 
Arnauld are followed by Mere Angelique, De Sacy, Pascal, 
Tillemont, De Ranee, Nicole, Racine, each with his own clearly 
marked personality yet stamped with the cachet of the group. 
The historian and the psychologist co-operate. 

The short but brilliant episode of the Regency has only lately 
attracted the attention it deserves. Saint-Simon's wonderful 
portrait of his friend and patron gives on the whole a discriminat- 
ing picture of the man, but, as Lemontey pointed out nearly a 

1 The fullest account of his work on Port Royal is in Michaud's impor- 
tant volume, Sainte-Beuve avant les Lundis, 1903 ; cp. Seche, Sainte-Beuve, 
2 vols., 1904. Sorel's essay, ' Sainte-Beuve et les historiens,' in Etudes de 
Litterature et d'Histoire, 1901, is brief but authoritative. 



222 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, century ago, has to be used with extreme caution. In particular 
XII his sketch of Dubois, whom he can never forgive for corrupting 
the youth of the Duke, conveys no adequate notion of his real 
ability and statesmanlike aims ; and it has been the achieve- 
ment of Emile Bourgeois to explore his foreign policy and to 
follow his dazzling fortunes. While condemning his subservience 
to the dynastic ambitions of his master and his attempt to play 
the part of the arbiter of Europe, he recognises the value of his 
work for the army, finance and commerce, and rebuts the charge 
that he was personally corrupt. 

Nearly half a century ago Jobez wrote the first detailed 
narrative of the reign of Louis XV, based chiefly on memoirs. 
The publication of his secret correspondence by Boutaric in 
1866 revealed a new Louis XV, no longer a mere faineant, but 
keenly interested in foreign affairs, above all in the fate of Poland. 
But while the royal diplomat sometimes recognised what ought 
to be done, he lacked the energy to accomplish it. The chief of 
the secret cabinet was the Comte de Broglie ; and the most 
important result of Boutaric's book was to determine the Due 
de Broglie x to learn more of the career of his ancestor. The 
appearance of ' Le Secret du Roi ' in 1878 was a literary event. 
Boutaric had given only the instructions of the King to his agents 
and his replies to their questions ; the correspondence of the agents 
themselves he had not found. The Duke found the correspond- 
ence of his grand-uncle at the Foreign Office, and added material 
from the family archives. ' What Louis concealed from the 
world was what was best in himself. There was often good sense, 
morality and patriotism behind the scenes, while on the stage 
strutted licentious frivolity.' But though there were rays of 
sense, there was never a sustained effort of will. The elegant 
style and the skill with which a sterile diplomacy is made read- 
able are beyond praise ; and the imbroglio of a double policy, 
the secret always in danger of being discovered by the King's 
own ministers, introduces a touch of comedy. 

When the story of the secret negotiations had been told the 
Duke turned to the official diplomacy of the reign. The first vol- 
umes, entitled ' Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa,' cover the 
first two years of the war of the Austrian Succession. France had 
opposed Austria since the time of Henri IV, and it was Belle-Isle's 
plan to re-establish the Empire free from Austrian preponderance ; 
but the flaw of the scheme was that it involved co-operation with 
Frederick, who abandoned his ally directly he had got what he 
wanted. Prussia went to war for Silesia, France for an idea, and 
1 See Fagniez' admirable volume, Le Due de Broglie, 1902. 



MIDDLE AGES AND ANCIEN REGIME 223 

success was rendered impossible by her incoherence and weak- CHAP. 
ness both in diplomacy and in arms. A still more terrible mistake XII 
was committed than that of merely undertaking a needless and 
unprofitable war. By supporting Frederick, France helped to 
foster the growth of a remorseless enemy. In painting his darkly 
shadowed portrait of the great King the historian is thinking of 
Bismarck and Moltke. The works which follow bring the pitiful 
story to the conclusion of the war in 1748. He admires the 
high character of D'Argenson, but deplores his blindness and 
his blunders. If the honour of France was saved, it was by her 
soldiers, by Belle-Isle's winter retreat from Prague and by the 
campaigns in which Saxe shed a last ray of glory on the declining 
fortunes of the monarchy. Maria Theresa is drawn with a loving 
hand. Only Louis is below his task. 

After devoting nine volumes to the War of the Austrian 
Succession, the appearance of ' The Austrian Alliance ' in 1897 
seemed to suggest that the Duke was about to embark on the 
Seven Years' War ; but he was now an old man, and the work 
was an epilogue. He concludes that the new grouping arose not 
from the resentment of the Pompadour at a jest of Frederick II 
or her delight at a compliment from Maria Theresa, but from 
mutual interest. Austria had desired it since 1748 and Louis 
was not averse. Yet even here, though French policy was 
back on the right road, the historian contrasts its vacillations 
with the skill of Kaunitz and the Empress. Moreover the change 
came too late. Austria was weak and Prussia was strong. 
The foreign policy of Louis has been further explored by Vandal, 
who traced his relations with Russia, and by Waddington, who 
is writing the history of the Seven Years' War in a spirit fairer 
to Frederick the Great and with a wider knowledge of foreign 
archives than the Duke possessed. For the life of the Court and 
the frail ladies who presided over it, the society, art and morals 
of the period, the sparkling anecdotage of the brothers De Gon- 
court, though not severely critical, is still of value. Among the 
innumerable studies of the salons of Paris the first place is held 
by the Marquis de Segur's exquisite volumes on Madame Geoffrin 
and Julie de Lespinasse. 

The later years of Louis XVI fall within the orbit of the 
Revolution ; but the earlier part of the reign has been somewhat 
neglected. Jobez has provided a useful summary, and Cherest 
has minutely studied the two critical years preceding the meeting 
of the States-General. The publication of the forged letters of 
Marie Antoinette l by Hunolstein and Feuillet de Conches in 1864 
1 See Farrer's Literary Forgeries, 1907, 



224 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, led Arneth to disinter her correspondence and that of the Austrian 
XII Minister Mercy d'Argenteau from the archives of Vienna, and 
thus to render possible a critical study of her life and character. 
The biography to which Flammermont devoted many years was 
left unfinished ; but scholarly contributions have been made by 
Nolhac and by Maxime de la Rocheterie. Segur is now engaged 
on a work of the first importance which will bring the story 
of the reign to the fall of Necker in 1781. The first volume 
is devoted to the ministry of Turgot, whose noble aims are 
recognised but whose hasty methods are censured with con- 
siderable severity. In his desire for an enlightened despotism 
rather than for the co-operation of classes he was behind the 
best thought of the time. The King is portrayed as a reformer, 
eager to economise but overruled by the Queen and the vested 
interests of the Court. 

Several works of importance throw light on the Ancien 
Regime, without confining themselves to any single reign. The 
instructions given to French Ambassadors between the Peace 
of Westphalia and the Revolution, edited by Sorel, Rambaud, 
Hanotaux and other scholars of the first rank, throw light on 
diplomatic relations with almost every country in Europe. Emile 
Bourgeois has traced foreign policy from the days of Richelieu. 
Ravaisson has compiled the annals of the Bastille, and Funck- 
Brentano has proved how seldom the grim fortress was the 
tomb of political offenders. Babeau has reconstructed the life 
of the provinces in a series of works of rare interest. The 
veteran jurist Viollet has begun a comprehensive survey of the 
institutions and administration of the Monarchy by a volume 
on the King and his Ministers. Levasseur has compiled the 
history of the working-classes, Avenel has reconstructed prices 
and wages, and Franklin has investigated national habits and 
modes of life. Sainte-Beuve's incomparable gallery of portraits 
illustrates almost every aspect and incident in the life of France 
from the Renaissance onwards. Finally may be mentioned the 
general histories. Henri Martin's * work in its ultimate form 
summarises historical scholarship at the time of the Second 
Empire. Though a republican and a freethinker, his sympathies 
extend to men of every age and every school who contributed 
to the unity and the glory of France. The volumes on the Ancien 
Regime are greatly superior to those on the Middle Ages. Though 
Guizot pronounced the book bad history, bad philosophy, and 

1 See Hanotaux' volume, Henri Martin, 1S85 ; Jules Simon's Mignet, 
Michelet, Henri Martin, 1890. H. de l'fipinois' volume, Henri Martin et 
son Histoire de France, 1872, voices Catholic and monarchist criticism. 



MIDDLE AGES AND A NCI EN REGIME 225 

bad literature, it found friends in every camp, and for nearly CHAP, 
half a century, despite its lack of originality and distinction, held XII 
its place as the national history. The briefer narratives of 
Lavallee and Dareste, despite their superior scholarship, never 
obtained the same popularity. The need for a popular survey 
was met by Duruy, and more recently by Rambaud's admirable 
summary of French civilisation. Lavisse's great co-operative 
' History of France ' incorporates the latest researches down to 
1789, and renders the older narratives without exception 
obsolete. 



CHAPTER XIII 

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 
I 

CHAP. The study of the French Revolution, 1 inaugurated by Thiers 
XIII and Mignet in the twenties, was carried further in the following 
decade by two works of widely different character and tendency. 
The first was the vast ' Histoire Parlementaire ' of Buchez 3 and 
his disciple Roux. Buchez was a convinced republican, who, 
like many young men of his generation, had joined and abandoned 
the Saint-Simonians. He had developed a curious system of 
thought in which Catholicism and socialism were blended. In 
the Revolution he saw the highest result of civilisation. Since 
equality is Christian, all hindrances to its attainment must be 
removed. These premisses led straight to a glorification of the 
Jacobins and Terrorists. The purest character of the Revolution 
was Robespierre, whose beneficent work was cut short by Ther- 
midor. The book contains not only the debates in the Assembly 
but extracts from the proceedings of the Jacobin Club and the 
Commune, from trials, newspapers and pamphlets, and immedi- 
ately took its place beside the Moniteur as an indispensable 
authority. 

A more serious attempt to explain and judge the Revolution 
was made by Droz, 3 who as a young man had fought in the 
army of the Rhine, and who in 1811 devoted himself to the 
main task of his life. The ' History of the Reign of Louis XVI 
during the years when it was possible to avoid or to guide the 
Revolution ' announced its standpoint in the title. His pages 
are a paean to Lally-Tollendal, Malouet and other constitutional 

1 See appendix to Acton's Lectures on the French Revolution, 1910; 
Paul lanet, Philosophie de la Revolution francaise, 4th ed., 1892 ; and 
Frederick Harrison, ' Historians of the French Revolution,' in The 
Choice of Books, 1886. 

2 See Flint's Philosophy of History, ch. 7. 

3 See Mignet, Portraits et Notices historiques, vol. 2. 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 227 

royalists of the English school, the rejection of whose proposals CHAP, 
in September 1789 is held to mark the fatal transition from XIII 
reason to passion. ' The moment one can direct a revolution is 
short. That moment is now past. Providence grew weary.' A 
third volume, disguised as an appendix, follows the attempts of 
Mirabeau to reconcile the Monarchy with the Revolution. ' Till 
the end of the Constituent there was a chance, however small, of 
guiding the movement.' In his admirable eloge Mignet rightly 
rejected the contention that the mistakes of 1789 or even the death 
of Mirabeau made a peaceful transition impossible ; but the 
value and interest of a thoughtful work are not destroyed if its 
theory of a fatal moment is repudiated. 

The three histories which began to appear in 1847 differed 
equally from Buchez and from Thiers, Mignet and Droz. While 
the latter were constitutional royalists, Lamartine, Michelet and 
Louis Blanc were ardent republicans. All alike desired to over- 
turn the throne. ' La France s'ennuie,' declared Lamartine 
in ominous words. Louis Philippe owed his accession and his 
fall in almost equal degree to the labours of historians. The 
most nakedly political of the three works was that of Lamartine. 1 
His poems had flowed from him without effort, and he made no 
serious attempt to prepare himself for his new task. It was 
enough for him if he knew the outlines of the plot ; his imagina- 
tion could supply the rest. Though it bears the title of a history 
of the Girondins and begins with the events of 1791, it is virtually 
a history of the Revolution and carries the narrative down to 
Thermidor. No man ever sat down to write with a more slender 
equipment of the qualities of an historian. He transposes dates, 
omits subjects which do not interest him, and invents incidents. 
He attempts a resurrection, like Michelet, but without Michelet's 
careful preparation. His judgment is as faulty as his knowledge. 
He was naturally a humane man, and he never directly glorifies 
crime ; but his governing purpose was to exalt the Revolution. 
Discovering himself in the Girondins, above all in Vergniaud, he 
glories in their idealism and paints in dazzling colours the 
imaginary Last Supper. When the Girondins are gone he trans- 
fers his devotion to Robespierre, a disciple of Rousseau and almost 
a new Christ. But the individual on whom he lavishes the whole 
resources of his pathos and eloquence is Charlotte Corday. Her 
history, of which we know little and of which Lamartine knew 
less, fills half a volume, the scanty facts being eked out with an 

1 See Deschanel, Lamartine, vol. ii., ch. 21, 1893. An admirable 
appreciation of the man and his work is in Jules Simon, Quatre Portraits, 
1895- 

Q 2 



228 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, abundance of imaginary incidents. The story of ' the angel of 
XIII assassination ' ranks with Michelet's picture of Joan of Arc among 
the supreme achievements of French prose. But while the one 
is history, the other is romance. 

On the day of the publication of the first two volumes Lamar- 
tine wrote to a friend, ' I have staked my fortune, my literary 
renown and my political future, to-day on a card. I have won. 
The publishers tell me there has never been such a success.' 
While the critics shook their heads, the printers could hardly kaep 
pace with the demand. With its florid Corinthian style it was 
the first work on history that had been eagerly read by women. 
' J'ai pour moi les femmes et les jeunes gens,' wrote the author ; 
' je peux me passer du reste.' He asked Dumas what he con- 
sidered to be the reason of such a triumph. ' Because you have 
raised history to the level of the novel,' replied the novelist. 
The compliment is the severest condemnation ever passed on the 
book, and there is nothing to add to it. It was music, poetry, 
drama, romance, politics — anything but history. Tocqueville, 
after working with him, declared in his ' Memoirs ' that he had 
never known a mind less sincere nor one which had a more com- 
plete contempt for the truth. ' When I say he despised it, I am 
wrong. He did not honour it enough to occupy himself with it 
at all.' 1 When the Second Republic had come and gone and 
Lamartine's brief glory as a statesman was at an end, the fame 
of his book quickly paled. Nettement 3 published a reply in 
which 113 pages were filled with errors of fact. Looking back 
from the cool obscurity of old age, the author expressed his regret 
for certain passages and recognised the danger of his teaching. 
It was too late. The most worthless and the most eloquent of 
books had done its work. The Constitutional Monarchy had been 
succeeded by the Second Empire. 

The narrative of Louis Blanc 3 is a far more serious affair. 
The author had made his name in the early days of the July 
Monarchy as a republican journalist, and on the completion of 
the first decade of the rule of Louis Philippe published his ' Ten 
Years of French History.' The eloquent socialist pamphlet 
in five volumes was read all over Europe, and contributed more 
than any other work except the ' Girondins ' to prepare the Revo- 

1 Souvenirs, 164-5, 1893. 

2 Etudes critiques sur les Girondins, 1848 ; cp. Bire, La Legende des 
Girondins, 1882. 

3 An adequate biography of this remarkable man is much needed. 
There is a good, though brief, sketch in Spuller's Figures disparues, vol. i., 
1886. 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 229 

lution of 1848. Kings were the representatives of a dead past, the CHAP. 
bourgeoisie a hybrid monster corrupted by the love of lucre. XIII 
The people, on the other hand, though the source of all right, 
were excluded from power. ' Soon every theory will have been 
tried except the simplest and noblest, that of fraternity. Till this 
is applied let us not despair.' His second work was not less 
an instrument of propaganda. ' I was brought up by royalist 
parents, and horror of the Revolution was the first strong senti- 
ment that agitated me. But by study I learned to render 
homage to its great events and its great men.' No man could 
date the beginning of the French Revolution. ' All nations 
have contributed to produce it. It is the glory of France to have 
performed the work of the human race at the price of her own 
blood. All the revolts of the past unite and lose themselves in 
it, like rivers in the sea.' History is the record and the result of 
the operation of the principles of authority, individualism and 
fraternity. The reign of authority lasted unchecked till the 
Reformation, which inaugurated individualism. The former 
led to oppression, the latter to anarchy. Fraternity, fore- 
shadowed by Hus and the Anabaptists and first clearly announced 
by the Mountain, alone leads to liberty. The Revolution is a 
name for two distinct movements. The one, starting from 
Voltaire and represented by the Constituent Assembly, was a 
movement of the bourgeoisie for the profit of individualism ; the 
other, deriving from Rousseau and interrupted by Thermidor, 
was based on fraternity. To realise that great ideal another 
revolution will be necessary. 

Louis Blanc paints the close of the Ancien Regime in dark 
colours ; but he is no great admirer of the early leaders of the 
Revolution. Mirabeau was a mixture of greatness and baseness, 
bought by the Court but not lacking in nobilit}/. The Girondins 
were pure individualists, the sons of Voltaire, ineffective and 
vain. Marat, representative of a new power, journalism, was a 
monster of cruelty. The Jacobins, on the other hand, were only 
stern by necessity. ' If the Revolution became irritated let us 
deplore it, but let us remember the thousand needless provoca- 
tions.' The September massacres were not premeditated. There 
had been rumours of conspiracy in the prisons, and foreign armies 
were a few days' march from the capital. ' It is easy to under- 
stand how Paris fell into this Satanic intoxication.' Hideous 
as was the cruelty, it was disinterested. The execution of the 
King is described as a gigantic blunder, though not unjust. 
The task of the Revolutionists was to kill the monarchical idea, 
but the scaffold exalted and ennobled it. The later volumes are 



230 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, at once a mild condemnation of the Terror and a peean to Robes- 
XIII pierre. ' The Terror was not a system. It sprang, ready armed, 
from the entrails of the situation. Enveloped by intrigue and 
treason, it often struck down the innocent, but it always believed 
them to be guilty.' Attention had been too much concentrated 
on the horrors. ' After the battle the dead have been counted 
one by one and laid out bleeding before posterity. The lofty 
exertions of mind and the victories of thought have only been 
sketched. Yet there is the living history of the Revolution.' 
The Jacobins slew sadly and of necessity, to save themselves 
and the Revolution. Robespierre, who wished it to retain its 
energy while abating its fury, possessed little power. Thermidor 
was not a deliverance but a martyrdom, its victim a gentle and 
inspired enthusiast, a Puritan and a Stoic, the defender of the 
poor and the clear-sighted apostle of humanity. 

In closing the twelfth volume in 1862 the historian declared 
that the book had been the delight and the torment of his life 
for eighteen years. Its value lies not in its philosophy, which is 
superficial, nor in its judgments, which are often grotesque, 
but in its patient unravelling of events. 1 ' His method is truly 
scientific,' declares Aulard, 2 ' as he alleges no fact without its 
authority. Some of his appendices are masterpieces of historical 
criticism. It is still the best general work for making the Revolu-- 
tion known.' His study of Croker's collection of pamphlets 
during his years of exile under the Second Empire opened up a 
rich quarry. The story of the Vendee revolt, a dark world into 
which Michelet had darted a few rays, was for the first time told 
in full. While most historians laid down their pens at Thermidor, 
he brought his narrative to the close of the Convention. He 
devotes more attention than any of his predecessors to finance 
and economic conditions. On the other hand,- it is impossible 
to accept Aulard's verdict that he is the most impartial historian 
of the Revolution. Acton once spoke of his frigid passion. ' I 
pity the reader,' wrote Louis Blanc at the close of his work, 
' who does not recognise the accent of sincerity and the palpita- 
tions of a heart hungry for justice.' We recognise the accent of 
sincerity ; but the palpitating heart interferes with the opera- 
tions of the brain. He is the relentless enemy of the bourgeoisie, 
the uncompromising champion of the people. He judges men 
according as they belong to the rival schools of ' individualism ' 

1 Lanfrey severely criticised it in an appendix to his Essai sur la Revo- 
lution Francaise, 1857. For a German view see Hausser's Ges. Schriften, 
vol. i., 1869. 

2 Letter in Jullian's introduction to the Extraits, 1897. 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 231 

and ' fraternity,' taking the former at their worst and the latter CHAP. 
at their best. XIII 

The books written or commenced under the Restoration 
and the July Monarchy were all friendly to the Revolution. 
After 1848 the standpoint changed, and for a full generation the 
current of opinion ran strongly in the other direction. The first 
sign of the ebbing tide appears in the writings of Barante, who 
declared that but for the events of 1848, which overthrew the 
King whom he served and the Minister whom he loved, his books 
would not have been written. The old sophisms had reappeared, 
and even Robespierre and Marat had found defenders. His 
narrative of the Convention, which de Sacy declared to be the 
only book on the Revolution which satisfied his conscience, was 
a sustained attack on its principles and its leaders. The volumes 
on the Directory are more moderate. The new rulers of France 
were as blind and narrow as the Terrorists, but they were less 
violent. The Directors had an impossible task, for the country 
was poisoned by a deadly virus, the ravages of which were still 
felt. ' We shall never have stability till the revolutionary spirit 
is extinguished.' His protest would have carried more weight 
had it rested on deeper study. 

While Michelet and Louis Blanc were busy with their narra- 
tives of the Revolution, a man of widely different temperament 
and training was investigating the soil out of which it grew. 
Tocqueville's ' L'Ancien Regime et la Revolution,' which appeared 
in 1855, was described by its author as a study, not a history ; 
but it threw more light on its character than any of the histories, 
and inaugurated its scientific exploration. Tocqueville 1 belonged 
to the noblesse of Normandy. His father was a peer, his mother 
a granddaughter of Malesherbes. Finding little satisfaction in 
his career as a judge, he obtained leave to report on the penal 
methods of the United States. His real object was to study the 
problems of the New World. While the report on the penitentiary 
system is forgotten, ' Democracy in America ' is one of the 
classics of political science. Democracy was in itself neither 
good nor bad. Though he does not present the United States as 
a model, he admires them. The federal constitution and the 
Supreme Court contributed to secure the separation of powers on 

1 See Memoir, Letters and Remains of de Tocqueville, Eng. trans., 2 vols., 
1861 ; Correspondence and Conversations of Tocqueville with Nassau 
Senior, 2 vols., 1872 ; G. de Beaumont, Notice sur T., 1897. The best 
appreciations are by Mignet, Nouveaux Eloges historiques, 1877 ; Faguet, 
Politiques et Moralistes, vol. iii. ; Sainte-Beuve, Causeries, vol. xv., and 
Scherer, Etudes critiques, 1863. The Souvenirs deal only with his political 
career. Marcel's Essai politique sur T., 1910, deals fully with the publicist. 



232 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, which liberty rested. In most of the countries of the Old World 
XIII centralisation has already gone too far. Democracy began as 
the enemy of despotism, but it was as likely to become despotic 
as any other form of government. The author woke up to find 
himself famous, and Royer-Collard told him that there had been 
nothing like his book since Montesquieu. 

Tocqueville entered Parliament, but failed to impress the 
Chamber or the country. On the fall of the Monarchy he became 
Foreign Secretary; but the coup d'etat of 1851 brought his public 
life to a close, and after a short imprisonment he returned to his 
ancestral home to continue his studies of democracy. He wrote 
to a friend that he was resolved to discover and explain the 
causes, character and influence of the great events of the Revolu- 
tion, the Empire and the Restoration. The Revolution itself 
had proved so attractive that it had occurred to no one to study 
its relation to the regime which it superseded. This inquiry 
he carried out with extraordinary patience and skill. Realising 
the necessity of exploring the provincial archives he made a 
prolonged stay at Tours, where he found a complete collection of 
the records and correspondence of the Intendants. He pursued his 
researches in Normandy and Languedoc, studying the decrees 
of the Parlements and the registers of the parishes, and gradually 
acquired a clear conception of the classes of society and their 
relations, the nature and extent of feudal rights, the central 
and local administration in the eighteenth century. 

His results were startling enough. ' As I advanced I was 
surprised to find at every moment traits which meet us in France 
to-day. I discovered a mass of sentiments which I had thought 
were the offspring of the Revolution, a thousand habits which the 
Revolution is believed to have produced.' Above all, the central- 
ised administration was an inheritance from the Ancien Regime. 
France was subject to three governments : the King and his 
ministers, aided by the Intendants • the feudal powers and juris- 
dictions ; and finally the provincial institutions. Of these the 
first was by far the strongest. The feudal powers, though 
annoying, were weak, the provincial institutions ghosts of their 
former selves except in Brittany and Languedoc. Behind the 
facade of a dissolving aristocracy he detects a powerful centralisa- 
tion gradually extinguishing local life, corporations and seig- 
neurial jurisdiction. The second conclusion was that the Ancien 
Regime was less terrible than had been thought. There was 
much that was arbitrary, but little real oppression. Feudalism 
as a political system, aristocracy as a political force, had disap- 
peared, and the privileges that remained appeared all the more 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 233 

odious because the system of which they had formed a part was CHAP, 
dead. ' Some good people have endeavoured to rehabilitate XIII 
the Ancien Regime. I judge it by the sentiments it inspired in 
those who lived under it and destroyed it. I see that all through 
the Revolution, cruel as it was, the hatred of the old regime out- 
weighed all other hates, and that during the perilous vicissitudes 
of the last sixty years the fear of its return has outweighed all 
other fears. That is enough for me.' A revolution was inevitable, 
not because the condition of France was growing worse, but 
because it was growing better ; not because the burden was 
intolerable, but because Frenchmen were growing less patient 
of abuses. 

The book introduced a new perspective. Where others had 
seen a radical contradiction between the Monarchy and the 
Revolution, Tocqueville saw a logical continuation. The Ancien 
Regime was strongly centralised ; the Revolution centralised 
administration still further. The Ancien Regime had destroyed 
the greater part of feudalism ; the Revolution destroyed the 
rest. Neither one nor the other cared for liberty. The driving 
principle of the Revolution was equality ; and it was equality 
before the law which the Monarchy had been striving to establish 
in its long struggle with feudalism. ' The Revolution was the 
sudden and violent termination of a task at which ten generations 
had laboured.' The second volume was interrupted by death. 
The commencement of the reforming movement extorts his 
admiration. ' A time of inexperience, no doubt, but of generosity, 
enthusiasm, virility and grandeur, a time of immortal memory, 
to which men will look back with admiration and respect.' 
Its weakness was that liberty was sacrificed to equality. The 
hatred of inequality was deep and inextinguishable, while the 
love of liberty was more recent and less profound. They met 
in the Revolution, and for a moment inflamed the hearts of 
Frenchmen with the noble ideal of becoming equal in liberty. 
It was but for a moment, and the anarchy which succeeded it 
led straight to despotism. It was a tragic result but not un- 
natural, for nowhere had men so completely lost the sense and 
practice of affairs. Thus the work was left half accomplished. 
It secured equal laws, regularity, uniformity, at the cost of 
increasing centralisation. It failed to achieve liberty. 

Tocqueville 's second book was received with the same en- 
thusiasm as the first. It was indeed a second chapter of his 
treatise on democracy, a fresh warning, a renewed exhortation to 
his countrymen and to the world. ' To show men how to escape 
tyranny,' he wrote to a friend, ' that is the idea of both my 



234 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, books. To work in this sense is a holy mission, for which one 
XIII should spare neither money,, time nor life.' It was a noble ideal, 
nobly realised. He was free from party ties and party passions. 
He shared the conviction of the Doctrinaires that liberty de- 
manded a strong government which did not abuse its strength, 
and that in the separation of powers lay the secret of ordered free- 
dom. 'No political writer of the century can compare with him,' 
pronounces Scherer ; ' posterity will set up his bust at the feet of 
Montesquieu.' If his place as a publicist is secure, what of his 
fame as an historian ? Can we accept his reading of the Ancien 
Regime and its relation of the Revolution ? Sainte-Beuve 
charged him with injustice to Richelieu and Louis XIV. The 
Intendants, asserted the great critic, were better for the people 
than some royal governor, and centralisation begot equality 
before the law. A somewhat similar judgment was passed by 
the venerable Pasquier, the last survivor of the generation which 
knew the France that had vanished. The historian, he declared, 
exaggerated the absence of good elements of government and 
the consequent need of the Revolution. None the less, the con- 
clusion that it changed less than had been supposed, that in 
many directions it only accelerated the tendencies of the Ancien 
Regime, has become the starting-point of subsequent scholarship. 
In the words of Scherer, he accomplished for the Revolution 
what the geologists had done for the history of the globe. He 
destroyed the cataclysmic theory and substituted the slow action 
of secular causes. 

No one had expected Tocqueville, a Catholic and a royalist, 
to eulogise the Revolution ; but the world was astonished at the 
attack upon Jacobinism by a republican freethinker, the friend 
and ally of Michelet. From his earliest years Quinet l devoted 
his pen to the defence of liberty. Chief among its enemies he 
reckoned the Roman Church. Primitive Christianity rested on 
equality ; but the Church had been unfaithful to the principle. 
Moreover, it proscribed thought, the organ of progress, and 
paralysed the countries where it was dominant. His lectures 
on the Jesuits at the College de France were a declaration of war. 
In a further course on ' Christianity and the French Revolution ' 
he commends the Reformation as an attempt to return to primi- 

1 See Mme. Quinet, Edgar Quinet, 2 vols., 1888-9, and Cinquante Ans 
d'Amitie, Michelet et Quinet, 1903 ; Heath, Quinet, his Early Life and 
Writings, 1881. For appreciations see Faguet, Politiques et Moralistes, 
vol. ii., Spuller's Figures disparues, vol. i., and Monod, ' Le Centenaire de Q.' 
in Revue Historique, vol. lxxxii. Quinet's Histoire de mes Idees only 
reaches his seventeenth year. 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 235 

tive ideals, and bitterly laments its defeat in France. ' Alone of CHAP. 
modern nations, France has made a political and social revolu- XIII 
tion before achieving a religious revolution.' The foundation 
must be laid before the house can be built. England and 
America, starting from Protestantism, achieved their purpose. 
France, starting from Catholicism, had failed. The criticism 
of current ideas was continued in his ' Philosophy of French 
History.' Nations, he declared, were destroyed by false notions 
as well as by enemies ; and one of the most dangerous was the 
optimism which discovers that everything has been for the best. 
The Gauls were incapable of civilisation, and the Roman and 
Frankish conquests were therefore desirable. An earlier triumph 
of the Third Estate would have prevented the necessary unifica- 
tion of France. The rejection of Protestantism saved the country 
from the revival of feudalism. The Revolution was needed to 
assert the principle of freedom after the long reign of authority. 
This method of book-keeping entirely overlooked the debit side 
of the account, and it was to this side that he called attention. 
Guizot thankfully recognised how good was the result ; Quinet 
reflected how much better it might have been. 

His greatest and most enduring work, ' La Revolution,' 
which appeared in 1865, is a philosophic study, an attempt 
to understand its aim, to separate its good and evil elements, 
to show where and why it failed. It was written in exile, without 
access to a good library, and was in no respect a work of research. 
Its interest lies in the personality of its author and the aggressive 
novelty of his attitude. He calmly declares that the Revolution 
as a movement needs no apologia. The task was to discover 
why such immense efforts achieved such disproportionate results. 
' A whole people cried " Freedom or Death," and meant what it 
said. Why did not men who knew so well how to die know also 
how to become free ? ' Two main reasons, suggested in his 
' Christianity and the French Revolution ' twenty years before, 
were that it grew out of a Catholic soil and neglected to substitute 
Protestantism for Catholicism. The first was its misfortune, the 
second its own fateful error. It could not build on the Ancien 
Regime nor on the religion which was one of its essential parts. 
It could not rest on the impalpable theism of the Savoyard 
Vicar. The Civil Constitution antagonised the Church without 
destroying it. Catholicism in any form was irreconcilable 
with the new liberty. A further mistake was the adoption of 
violent methods. The death of the King was a gigantic blunder 
as well as a crime. The Terrorists committed a double sin. They 
continued the despotism of the past and fostered the despotism 



236 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, of the future. With the name of the Revolution on their lips 
XIII they laboured unceasingly for its destruction. Within eight 
years of the execution of Louis XVI Napoleon was supreme, the 
Concordat was signed, and the ' Genie du Christianisme ' was on 
every table. Despotism and Catholicism were again enthroned, 
and the work of emancipation remained to be done over again. 

Quinet's book is powerful and eloquent, but its most original 
thesis is untenable. He attacks the Revolution for its violence, 
and in the same breath scolds it for not destroying Catholicism 
root and branch. Political convictions must be treated with 
respect, but religious convictions must be trampled down. His 
violent animosity against the Church diminishes the impressive- 
ness of his attack on the Terror ; and his regret that Protestantism 
was not forcibly established in a land of Catholics, deists and 
atheists reveals his limitations as a practical statesman. But his 
onslaught on Jacobinism was vigorous and effective. ' The key 
and novelty of my book is the criticism of the Revolution in 
the name of the Revolution.' It led straight to the Empire, to 
Waterloo, to 1851. Two generations of despotism were the price 
of its mistakes. The Terror destroyed the Revolution instead of 
destroying its foes. The book aroused intense excitement. It 
was the first outspoken attack by a man whose devotion to 
democracy was beyond suspicion. When the Second Empire 
crushed liberty, democrats found comfort and inspiration in the 
Revolution ; but now the veil of the temple had been rent. The 
challenge was taken up with spirit by Alphonse Peyrat. 1 ' Quinet 
has outraged the purest and most devoted men, and in declaring 
that it was not worth its price has passed an insensate judgment.' 
In comparing its leaders to Caligula, Nero and Torquemada he was 
calumniating the Jacobins and the Committee of Public Safety. 
' The spirit of liberty spread by the Revolution throughout the 
world renders any lasting tyranny impossible.' ' Everything 
in your book,' wrote Michelet, ' is great, strong, magnanimous. 
It is a triumph for me too, as you and I are the same person.' 
This was the voice of friendship ; but the difference of view was 
profound. Michelet had condemned the Terror while assigning 
the major responsibility to the Emigres and the counter-revolu- 
tion ; Quinet scourged it for conscious and deliberate crimes. 
Michelet rejoices that the Revolution boldly substituted Justice 
for Christianity ; Quinet laments that a purer form of Christianity 
was not established. The book must be in part interpreted as a 
shaft aimed at Louis Napoleon. ' It is an act of accusation 
against the Empire,' wrote the Moniteur with perfect truth. 
1 La Revolution et le Livre de M. Quinet, 1866. 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 237 

His quarrel with the Revolution for opening the door to Napoleon CHAP, 
scarcely allowed him to realise how immense was the work that XIII 
it achieved, and how great an impetus it gave to many of his own 
most cherished ideas. 

While Ouinet's volumes added nothing to the knowledge of 
events, Mortimer-Ternaux' ' History of the Terror ' inaugurated 
the systematic study of the archives. His standpoint was one of 
moderate liberalism. The principles of 1789 are frankly accepted. 
' We are the children of the French Revolution, and we will not 
blaspheme our mother.' The action of the Court was unwise, 
the achievements of the Constituent Assembly immense. But 
the same reasons which lead to the support of 1789 involve 
condemnation of 1792-3. ' Two principles dispute the world, 
liberty and despotism. Demagogy is one of the incarnations of 
despotism. To oppose demagogy is to oppose despotism.' The 
Terror was not the work of the nation, and France was saved 
in spite of it. It began, he declared, on June 20, 1792, with the 
invasion of the Tuileries. So abundant was his material that 
the work only covered a single year, and was terminated by 
death before he reached the establishment of the Revolutionary 
Tribunal. His colossal monograph, filled with extracts from 
the registers of the Paris sections and reports to the Commune, 
has worn well and is still indispensable. 

Where Mortimer-Ternaux left off Wallon began. He had won 
fame among scholars by his ' History of Ancient Slavery ' and 
among pious Catholics by his biographies of St. Louis and Joan of 
Arc, and it was not till the later decades of his long life that he 
turned his attention to the Revolution. Campardon had pub- 
lished a study of the Revolutionary Tribunal in 1866, based on 
the official reports of its proceedings, but his work was little more 
than a sketch. Wallon's ' Histoire du Tribunal Revolutionnaire ' 
published large quantities of new material and connected its 
activity with the general movement of the Revolution. We 
receive full details of the great trials, Charlotte Corday, Custine, 
the Queen, the Girondins, Egalite, Roland, Danton, Robespierre, 
ending with those of the members of the Tribunal itself ; but 
its most hideous feature was the punishment of the young and 
the obscure. Wallon's last work touched another side of the 
problem of the administration of justice under the Terror. The 
' Revolutionary Tribunal ' dealt with Paris, the ' Representatives 
on Mission ' with the provinces. Though they repressed many 
local abuses they were terrible instruments of tyranny, and 
some of them were as remarkable for their incapacity as for their 
savage cruelty. The subsequent publication of the complete 



238 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, correspondence makes it clear that Wallon emphasised the 
XIII criminal side of their activity and failed to do justice to their 
labours in the organisation of national defence. 

While the political side of the Revolution was being investi- 
gated, the first attempt at social history was made by the brothers 
De Goncourt, whose volumes on the Revolution and the Direc- 
tory reconstructed the life and thought, the morals and amuse- 
ments, the atmosphere |and colour of the time. Their sources 
included newspapers, brochures, fly-sheets, caricatures, and reveal 
the profound dislocation of society and the rapid deterioration 
of morals. More serious were the researches of Adolf Schmidt, 
who, though a German, presented part of his results in a French 
dress. Based on the police reports addressed to the Minister of 
the Interior, his ' Tableaux de la Revolution francaise ' bring us 
closer to the life of the populace than any other work. We 
overhear the conversation of the crowd and learn what the women 
of Paris were thinking. %He shows the influence of economic 
conditions, the antagonism of rich and poor, the effect of the 
assignats on prices, the famine, the increase of crime, the begin- 
nings of socialism. 



II 

The most powerful and resounding attack on the Revolution 
since Burke came from an unexpected quarter. While Quinet 
wrote more in sorrow than in anger, it was reserved for Taine, 1 the 
idol of radical France, the apostle of determinism and materialism, 
to declare against the Revolution as a whole. ' Of books that 
are strong enough to work a change and form an epoch in a 
reader's life,' declared Acton, ' there are two, perhaps, on our 
^evolutionary shelf. One is Taine, and the other Michelet. No 
man feels the grandeur of the Revolution till he reads Michelet, 
"or the horror of it without reading Taine.' 

The main interest of his early life was in philosophy, and after 
playing a sonata of Beethoven he pronounced it as beautiful 
as a syllogism. His teachers were struck by his extraordinary 
power. ' He is easily first in everything,' wrote Vacherot, ' and 

1 The literature on Taine is enormous. His Life and Letters appeared 
in English, 1902-8. The best general surveys are by Giraud, Essai sur 
Taine, 1902 ; A. de Margerie, Hippolyte Taine, 1894 ; and Lacombe, Taine, 
Historien et Sociologue, 1909. The best appreciations are by Boutmy, 
in Taine, Scherer, Laboulaye, 1901 ; Monod, in Taine, Renan, Michelet, 
1896 ; Bourget, in Essais de Psychologie contemporaine, 1883 ; Sorel, in^ 
Nouveaux Essais d'Histoire et de Critique, 1898. 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 239 

the most industrious and distinguished pupil I have ever known CHAP, 
at the Ecole Normale. His erudition is prodigious for his age, XIII 
and such passion for learning I have never witnessed. His 
mind is remarkable for rapidity of conception, subtlety, strength. 
But he judges and formulates too rapidly. He has a weakness 
for formulas and definitions, to which he too often sacrifices 
reality. His moral nature, however, is a stranger to any passion 
but truth, and is above all temptation.' More than forty years 
later the obituaries had merely to repeat this searching analysis 
of the young Normalien. Taine early reached the conviction 
that the methods of science must be applied to the record of 
civilisation, and his passion for exact observation was fostered by 
his studies in medicine and anatomy. He expounded his philo- 
sophy of history in the introduction to his famous work on 
English Literature. The three forces which in combination pro- 
duce civilisation and determine its transformations are the race, 
the milieu and the moment. ' History is a mechanical problem. 
The only difference is that it cannot be measured by the same 
means or defined so exactly.' ' It is a science,' he wrote to a friend, 
' analogous to physiology and zoology, not to geometry. My idea 
has lain on the ground since Montesquieu ; I have only picked 
it up.' But Montesquieu never imprisoned history in an iron 
cage. Race, milieu and moment are factors which themselves 
require further analysis. Race is a product of history, not an 
ultimate element. The milieu, except in its physical aspect, is 
itself a result. Taine explains everything in a great man except 
his greatness ; for the springs of genius are beyond plummet's 
sounding. The same over-simplification is apparent in the 
doctrine of the faculle mailresse. Every man, he declared, 
was distinguished by a dominating characteristic ; and he illus- 
trated his contention in monographs on Livy and La Fontaine, 
in the studies of which the ' English Literature ' is composed, and 
in lectures on the Philosophy of Art. Yet many individuals are 
distinguished, not by one dominant characteristic, but by a har- 
monious balance of qualities. Again, the master faculty is in 
many cases a result. Livy is explained by his oratorical instinct 
— itself the outcome of a combination of intellectual and political 
influences. The fullness of life and the riddle of personality cry 
aloud for more subtle and discriminating treatment. 

When the ' English Literature ' was finished Taine composed 
the philosophic work planned while he was at college, and in 1870 
his treatise on Intelligence appeared. The preface once more 
stated his theory of history in unmistakable terms. ' History 
is applied psychology. The historian notes and traces the 



240 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, transformations presented by a human molecule or group of 
XIII human molecules, and explains them by their psychology — 
Carlyle of Cromwell, Sainte-Beuve of Port-Royal, Stendhal of 
the Italians, Renan of the Semitic race. For fifteen years I have 
contributed to these special and concrete psychologies ; I now 
attempt a general and abstract psychology.' His famous sentence, 
' Virtue and vice are products like sugar and vitriol,' became the 
symbol of French materialism, and Bishop Dupanloup issued 
a solemn warning to the parents and youth of France against 
the teaching of Taine, Renan and Littre. A few months later 
the German invasion gave a wholly new orientation to his life. 
In December 1870 he wrote to Sorel, ' Our duty will be publicly 
to confess our faults, to discover in those faults the causes of 
our reverses, to spread knowledge of languages and history.' 
The Commune left a still more poignant memory. He became 
convinced that French civilisation was a veneer beneath which 
""boiled and seethed the primeval passions of savagery. 
<-"■ Taine had taken no great interest in politics before the war, 
but now they absorbed him. The first decisive result of his 
meditations was that England was on the right track, and France 
on the wrong. His ' Notes sur l'Angleterre,' written during the 
war, express his admiration for the conservatism of the people. 
The island kingdom appeared to him the home of ordered liberty. 
His own countrymen inspired him with terror, almost with 
despair. ' Your Memoirs,' he wrote to Guizot, ' prove that in the 
conflict between the nation and your government the nation 
was wrong. In general the French have acted and thought 
since 1789 partly like madmen, partly like children.' In another 
image he compared France to a vicious horse mounted by bad 
riders. ' History shows that states, governments, religions, 
churches, are the only means by which the animal and savage 
man acquires his little portion of reason and justice.' While 
Rousseau taught that man was naturally good and was made 
bad by society, Taine believed that man was naturally bad and 
was made less bad by institutions. In this spirit he set to work 
to study the causes of the present discontents. His book was 
to be a sociological interpretation, not an historical narrative. 
His models were Guizot and Tocqueville on one side, Stendhal, 
Balzac and Sainte-Beuve on the other. 

The first volume of the ' Origins of Contemporary France ' 1 

1 The most complete and authoritative examination of this work is by 
Aulard, Taine, Historien de la Revolution fyancaise, 1907. For criticisms 
of the first volume see Sorel' s review in Revue Historique, vol. ii,, and 
Morley's Miscellanies, vol. iii. 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 241 

appeared in 1875. The preface sharply challenges the whole CHAP, 
theory of democracy. Ten million ignorances do not make XIII 
knowledge. The people can tell what sort of government they 
desire, but not what they need. To prescribe for the present, one 
must know the past. The Ancien Regime must therefore be 
studied as a whole. The Court and the salons, art and literature, 
are known to all ; but they were not France. We must recon- 
struct the life of the provinces, the bourgeoisie, the peasantry and 
the artisan. Taine's picture is unfavourable without being 
hostile. He gives full credit to the monarchy, the noblesse and 
the clergy for building up the nation ; but the utility of the Crown 
had been forgotten in its abuses, and the nobles had ceased to 
render the services which had once justified their privileges. 
The Church is censured for its intolerance, the unequal dis- 
tribution of its vast wealth and its non-resident clergy ; the 
merits of its humbler members are fully recognised. The 
condition of the peasant, crushed by taxation, is painted in 
dark colours. The grievances of the tiers etat, on the other 
hand, were rather sentimental than practical. ' Already, before 
the final crash, France is in dissolution, because the privileged 
classes have forgotten their duties and responsibilities.' The 
determination to substitute a picture for a narrative is legitimate ; 
but in attempting to portray a century he commits the fatal 
error of drawing traits from different generations, and presents 
a description which is not wholly true of any period. By the 
side of Tocqueville he is merely a brilliant amateur. 

The novelty of the volume lies in its derivation of the 
revolutionary spirit. The thesis is that the philosophy of the 
eighteenth century was the product of ' the classic spirit,' which 
was invented by Descartes and the essence of which was to 
pursue the absolute and to worship uniformity. When the French 
mind turned to politics it proceeded to prescribe according 
to the dictates of pure reason. This neglect of the individual, 
the concrete, the real, was the mark alike of literature, of the 
Philosophes and of the Revolution, and its predominance was 
the main cause of the tragedies of modern France. But the tend- 
ency which he condemns should rather be called the deductive 
spirit. The classic tradition was boldly challenged by Rousseau, 
the chief inspiration, in Taine's view, of the revolutionary > ^-— •"- 
leaders, and Montesquieu was its open enemy. In the next place 
he forgets that the French political theories of the eighteenth 
century were borrowed from the thinkers of other lands. Thirdly, 
the deductive spirit was a reforming and fertilising as well as a 
destructive influence. The free play of the strongest minds of 



242 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. France led to the removal of much that was below the standard 
XIII of the age, and to a notable advance in tolerance and justice. 
Large parts of their programme, again, were suggested not by 
deductive reasoning from abstract notions, but by observation 
of the society in which they lived. ' This vast and admirable 
effort of intelligence and speculation,' remarks Sorel with justice, 
' was not fated to end in Utopias and Revolution.' It pointed 
to reform, not to anarchy. The comparison of France to a man, 
rather weak in constitution, who drinks greedily of a new liquor 
and suddenly falls to the ground, foaming at the mouth, is 
utterly delusive. To attribute the Revolution to Rousseau is as 
childish as to attribute it to Plutarch. 

' L'Ancien Regime ' was greeted with general admiration, 
though it completely satisfied no one. Royalists noted with 
satisfaction that the Revolution was attributed in such large 
measure to the Philosophes ; Catholics welcomed the testi- 
monial to the lower clergy ; Republicans quoted his views as to 
the sufferings of the peasantry. When Taine reaches the Revolu- 
tion itself the relatively balanced attitude disappears. 1 In his 
' English Literature ' he had sharply criticised Carlyle's dis- 
paraging verdict. ' These madmen, these hungry sans-culottes, 
fought on the frontier for humanitarian interests and abstract 
principles. Generosity and enthusiasm abounded here as with 
you. They pursued philosophy as your Puritans religion. 
Their goal was the salvation of all, as your Puritans sought the 
salvation of self. They combated evil in society as your Puritans 
in the soul. Like them, they possessed heroism, but of a 
propagandist kind which has reformed Europe, while yours only 
-^ helped yourselves.' The Commune and further study completely 
altered his opinion. In a letter of 1878 he writes, ' Till I studied 
the documents I took the same view of the Revolution as other 
Frenchmen. Since Thiers we have chosen to live in a world of 
illusion. Drama, poetry, a vague humanitarian philosophy have 
magnified all these people.' A work was needed, he declared, 
based solely on contemporary testimony and official acts, without 
reference to the controversies of a later generation. ' I have 
written as if my subject was the revolutions of Florence or 
Athens.' 

1 See the powerful essay, ' Taine et la Revolution,' in Scherer's Etudes 
sur la Littevature contemporaine, vol. vii. The work was also severely 
condemned by Martin Philippson, in Hist. Zeitschrift, vol. xli., Fagniez 
and Gazier in Revue Historique, vols, vii.-viii., and Brunetiere in 
Histoire et Litterature, vol. iii., 1885. Cochin's La Crise de VHistoire 
revolutionnaire, 19 10, attempts to defend Taine against Aulard. 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 243 

When the Due de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt brought the CHAP, 
news of the rising in Paris, Louis XVI remarked, ' It is a revolt.' xm 
The duke replied, ' Sire, it is a revolution.' As the duke cor- 
rected the King, the historian corrects the duke. ' It is not a 
revolution, but a dissolution.' With the fall of the central 
government disappeared the security of life and property. The 
distinction between the principles of '89 and '93 was contemptu- 
ously rejected. On being asked when the Terror began, Malouet 
had replied, ' On the fourteenth of July, 1789.' Taine shared his 
opinion. The ' golden dawn ' never existed. Moderate men were 
never at the helm. Sound principles never prevailed. Bloodshed 
and rapine began at once, and the human tiger bounded forth 
from his lair. He gathered a good deal of valuable material 
in reference to the burning of chateaux, the maltreatment of 
nobles, and the influence of famine in the provinces. The 
Revolution, he declared, was in essence a transfer of property. 
' That is its permanent force, its primary motive, its historical 
meaning.' No historian can now assert that the opening months 
were a period of peaceful reform, interrupted only by an occasional 
explosion like the march to Versailles. On the other hand, the 
label of ' spontaneous anarchy ' is a gross exaggeration. There 
were thousands of villages in which the Ancien Regime fell 
without bloodshed or disturbance. The reader is told of no 
single act of virtue or wisdom. He hears only of evil men and 
the crimes and follies they commit. The attack on the Bastille 
is attributed to popular frenzy, and no reference is made to the 
belief that the troops summoned by the Court were to be em- 
ployed for a coup. The Constituent Assembly is allowed to have 
planted some useful germs in the domain of private law ; but in 
the sphere of political and social reorganisation it acted like an 
academy of Utopians. Like a blind operator it destroyed not only 
the tumours but the living organs. ' It had only one fault left 
to commit, and this it committed by resolving that none of its 
members should find a place in its successor.' The King was 
retained as an impotent mockery. The ' spontaneous anarchy ' 
of 1789 had become the ' legal anarchy ' of 1791. ' Such was 
France — exhausted by fasting under the Monarchy, intoxicated 
by the bad brandy of the " Contrat Social " and a score of other 
heady beverages. The period of joyous delirium is over, and the 
period of sombre delirium is about to begin.' 

The work was received with plaudits by Royalists and Catholics, 
and with indignation by Republicans of every school. Shortly 
before it appeared Taine wrote to his mother, ' The Revolution 
seen at close quarters is quite different from what is generally 



244 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, believed. It is a religion, and people will rush at me as if I was a 
XIII blasphemer.' The attribution of the violence of the leaders to 
their philosophy is a gigantic delusion. Many of the actions of 
the Constituent were unwise, and the Civil Constitution was a 
colossal blunder ; but a definite reason can be assigned for every 
one of them independently of any philosophy. The Rights of Man 
were not only a declaration of abstract principle, but a protest 
against concrete abuses. The dominant personality of the 
Constituent was Mirabeau, one of the greatest of political realists ; 
but Mirabeau is scarcely mentioned. Its mistakes were caused, 
not by the teaching of Rousseau, but by the inherent difficulty of 
regenerating France, complicated by its own inexperience. 

The second and third volumes on the Revolution deal with 
the conquest of power by the Jacobins and with the use they made 
of it. Taine thought little of the Constituent, but he looks back 
to it with something like regret when he reaches the mediocrities 
of the Legislative and the pygmies of the National Assembly. 
In the Constituent there had been a handful of wise and sober 
men like Malouet and Mounier ; but the later Assemblies were 
filled exclusively with theorists, whose dominating principle 
was the sovereignty of the people, by which they understood, 
not the majority of French citizens, but the mob of Paris. The 
Jacobins installed a power at once terrible and imbecile, ' a 
fierce and suspicious Sultan, who, having appointed his viziers, 
holds his sabre ready at any moment to cut their throats. ' On 
the foundation of maxims of universal liberty they erected a 
despotism worthy of Dahomey, a tribunal like that of the 
Inquisition and human hecatombs like those of ancient Mexico. 
Visitors to the sanctuaries of ancient Egypt, on asking to see the 
statue of the god, were shown a crocodile lying on a purple carpet 
behind a richly embroidered veil. France possessed a similar 
theology, the tenets of which were formulated by Rousseau. ' In 
three years they conducted the crocodile into the sanctuary and 
installed him behind the golden veil on the purple carpet. The 
god naturally chose fat victims ; but his voracity was so great 
that he also devoured the thin. Once or twice a year he devoured 
a fellow crocodile, or was himself devoured.' 

Such in brief is Taine's celebrated picture of Jacobin psycho- 
logy. It is the kernel of his work, the part to which he gave most 
attention and by which his reputation as an historian must stand 
or fall. But is the Jacobin unlike all other men before him ? 
Are his actions explained by his adoption of the theories of 
Rousseau ? No serious student can answer these questions 
affirmatively. The heated feeling and violence of language 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 245 

recall the fevered accents of the ' Reflections on the French CHAP. 
Revolution ' and the ' Regicide Peace.' He professed to be a XIII 
naturalist ; but naturalists do not abuse the objects which they 
investigate. ' The Revolution,' declared Scherer in astonish- 
ment, ' has transformed the most abstract of our thinkers into 
an excited polemist.' In his anger he throws his determinism to 
the winds. We are dealing with a pessimist in a passion. He 
charges the Jacobins — the term is used generically — with regard- 
ing men as automata ; but his own Jacobins are pure automata, 
strange monsters which never existed. He convicts them of . 
blindness to the facts around them ; but he is himself blind to f 
the most important influences which guided their conduct. He ? 
depicts them springing fully armed from the brain of Rousseau, 
learning nothing, forgetting nothing, functioning in the void ; 
whereas the real Jacobins,, the members of the Jacobin Club,were 
monarchists during the early part of the Revolution. He warns | 
his readers that he is not going to relate the history of diplomacy \ 
and war ; yet he omits not only their history but their influence. — «... 
He portrays the Representatives on Mission as wild beasts, of 
whom Carrier is the type, their actions governed by blood-mania. 
The Emigres on the Rhine, the ceaseless intrigues of the Court with 
foreign Powers, the flight to Varennes, the hostile armies massed 
on the frontier a few days' march from the capital, the savage 
threats of the Brunswick manifesto, the rebellion in the West — 
these menacing facts, without which the domestic history is un- 
intelligible, are left virtually unnoticed. The leaders were driven 
to madness, not by Rousseau, but by fear of losing the fruits of 
the Revolution. Taine confesses that he has only reached one 
conclusion in politics, namely that society is very complicated. 
He forgot that man also is complicated, that his motives are 
manifold, and that it is the duty of an historian in judging men to 
understand the nature of the problems by which they are 
confronted. 

His letters show that he had formed his judgment of the 
Revolution before he began the detailed study of its sources. 
Having formed it, he sought for confirmation. He trusts too 
much to memoirs, and surrenders himself unreservedly to the 
guidance of Gouverneur Morris and Mallet du Pan. He greedily 
swallows every scrap of hostile evidence. He condensed and 
translated a volume purporting to contain the experiences of an 
English lady in France during the Terror, but more probably the 
work of John Gifford, an extreme anti-Jacobin of low character. 
By following his footsteps in the archives Aulard has discovered 
how superficial was his research and how unscientific his method. 



246 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. jj e dipped into the bundles to find confirmation for his views. 
He tears passages from their context. He only makes use of two 
newspapers, the Moniteur, the authority of which has been 
overthrown, and the Mercure, because Mallet du Pan wrote in 
it. Scherer remarked that he had plunged into the ocean of 
documents and been drowned. He collected a mass of details, 
many of them utterly insignificant, while omitting matters of 
vital importance. It is his method, not his verdict, which leads 
Aulard to declare that the work is virtually useless for the 
purposes of history. 

' For forty years,' wrote Taine in 1891, ' my work has been 
nothing but pure or applied psychology.' He wrote his ' Origines ' 
in the same practical spirit in which he aided the Fxole libre des 
Sciences Politiques. ' We want to fill with facts, figures, and 
documents, the heads which, if empty, would harbour Utopias.' 
He did his best to supply such instruction ; but no teacher can 
help his countrymen by proclaiming a gospel of discouragement 
and despair, and no prophet can regenerate the State without 
faith in God or man. He held that where organised Christianity 
disappears public and private morals decay ; but though he came 
to regard it as socially indispensable it remained intellectually 
incredible. He rejects alike the Church, the Ancien Regime, 
the Revolution, Napoleon, modern democracy. ' If the future 
wishes to know the state of the soul of France on the morrow of the 
Franco-German war, it will open this book, which in its despairing 
pages prolongs and renews the cry of the vanquished.' 1 

While Taine was thus engaged, his friend Albert Sorel 2 
was at work on ' Europe and the French Revolution.' Though 
less of a thinker, the younger scholar possessed a far deeper 
knowledge of history and a more judicial mind, and his place as 
an historian is incomparably higher. After studying law in Paris 
the young Norman, on Guizot's advice, entered the Foreign 
Office, and when the conflict of 1870 broke out he displayed 
skill and judgment in drawing up diplomatic documents. After 
the war, though Gambetta wished him to become Political 
Director of the Foreign Office, he withdrew from active diplomatic 
work. He threw himself into the life of the Ecole libre des 
Sciences Politiques at the invitation of Boutmy, and, next to the 

1 Hanotaux. 

2 See Picot, 'Notice sur Sorel,' in Stances de VAcademie des Sciences 
morales et politiques, 1907 ; Boutmy, Etudes politiques, 1907 ; Monod in 
Revue Historique, vol. xcii. ; and Discours a la fete en honneur de Sorel, 
1905, on completing his great work. There is a good article on the book 
in Quarterly Review, Oct. 1907. 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 247 

founder, was the soul of the school for thirty years. His first CHAP, 
important book, ' The Diplomatic History of the War,' contained XIII 
despatches of some of which he was himself the author. But 
the main occupation of his life was the diplomatic history of the 
revolutionary period. The first-fruits of his studies appeared 
in the Revue Historique in detailed articles on the Treaty of 
Basel, the mission of Custine to Brunswick, and other aspects of 
international relations. The plan gradually arose in his mind of 
a comprehensive study of the struggle between Europe and the 
Revolution. His object was to exhibit the Revolution, which 
appeared to some the subversion to others the regeneration of the 
old world, as the natural result of the history of France and 
Europe. Tocqueville had found the model of the internal policy 
of the Revolution in the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV. 
Sorel announced that in their foreign policy the revolutionists 
were the direct heirs of the Monarchy. 

The first volume, the most novel and striking of the whole 
work, analyses the political methods and ideas of the eighteenth 
century. Europe was morally bankrupt. In his book on the 
Eastern Question he had already brought a severe indictment 
against the Philosophic Despots. ' It has often been said abroad, 
and even repeated in France, that the Revolution and Napoleon 
upset the law of nations, and substituted for a kind of golden age 
of diplomacy, where right ruled without a rival, an age of iron 
in which might prevailed against all rights. To judge fairly 
we must know what was the conception of right and the practice 
of the representatives of the Ancien Regime.' The book revealed 
that in the partition of Poland Frederick the Great, Catherine II 
and Kaunitz recognised no law but their selfish interests. These 
were the three Courts which were to attack the Revolution, and 
France merely adopted the principles on which they had acted. 
A second reason for the decrepitude of old Europe lay in the reform 
movement which invaded every country during the eighteenth 
century. The ruin of ancient institutions left the throne isolated, 
the spread of rationalism encouraged men to challenge tradition, 
and the sweeping changes inaugurated by the Philosophic Despots 
led to further unsettlement. A revolution appeared inevitable 
in almost every country, and it broke out in Belgium earlier 
than in France. A third solvent was the pervading influence of 
French ideas and manners. For the first time since the Middle 
Ages there was a distinct community of ideas; but the fountain- 
head was no longer Rome but Paris. After analysing the weak- 
ness of Europe, he proceeds to show how the old regime in France 
prepared the way for the Revolution. Autocracy anticipated 



248 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, the omnipotence of the Chamber ; Gallicanism pointed to the 
XI11 Constitution Civile ; the persecution of the Protestants provided 
a working model for the attack on the Emigres ; the journees 
anticipated the coups of the Revolution ; Richelieu and Louis XIV 
gave France a taste for dictatorship and founded the tradition of 
conquest. Thus both at home and abroad the weapons were 
ready for use. 

Having thus set the Revolution in the main stream of Euro- 
pean development, he proceeds to sketch its early stages and its 
effect on foreign opinion. He recognises the nobility of the ideas 
with which the leaders set out ; but they soon began to play the 
role of conquerors and to demand the 'natural frontiers.' He 
never forgets the importance of individuals ; but he believed in 
the logic of history, in the compulsion of collective and hereditary 
tendencies. While the nation craved a strong government, the 
timid ministers of a timid King led it to anarchy. Thus power 
naturally passed to those who had a policy and were not afraid 
to act. Sorel is one of the fairest of historians. He is equally 
free from the bitterness of Sybel and Taine and from the lyrical 
transports of Michelet and Louis Blanc. He does full justice to the 
better side of the revolutionists, and never forgets the staggering 
difficulties by which they were confronted. He does not scoff 
at the Declaration of the Rights of Man, but he contests its 
practical value. He is fair to the Emigres, distinguishing the 
earlier intransigeants, who endeavoured to arm Europe against 
their country, from the later, who were the victims of persecution. 
He is just to the Court, censuring its policy but comprehending 
its instincts. He emphasises the guarded character of the De- 
claration of Pillnitz and the essential moderation of the Emperor 
Leopold. 

The third and fourth volumes deal exhaustively with the war, 
defensive and offensive, and its relation to domestic policy. He 
agrees with Sybel that the Powers were too busy planning the 
destruction of Poland to desire a life-and-death struggle with 
France. But Marie Antoinette laboured to stir up war, Austria 
threatened to interfere in Avignon, and the King of Prussia 
prepared a plan of invasion before the French declaration of 
hostilities. He ascribes the direct responsibility to the Girondins, 
though the explosive forces of the Revolution and the old instinct 
of aggrandisement prepared the way. But his sympathies are 
none the less with his country in the conflict, for the integrity of 
national territory and the maintenance of the priceless conquests 
of the Revolution were at stake. Even when the French armies 
assume the offensive his blessing at first goes with them. In 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 249 

demanding the Rhine as a frontier they were only renewing CHAP, 
the traditional policy of the Monarchy. To defend this frontier XIII 
they needed to create a ring of tributary States. Thus the con- 
quest of Belgium was justified, but that of Holland was not. 
He exhibits the intimate connection between the danger on the 
frontier and the worst excesses in Paris. Thus the advance of 
the armies and the Brunswick manifesto led to the September 
massacres ; the execution of the King was, as Danton said, a reply 
to foreign dictation ; the immolation of the Girondins followed 
the treason of Dumouriez. He acquits the leaders of Taine's 
ridiculous charge of being the slaves of certain abstract principles, 
and shows how their conduct is explained by their determination 
to resist the restoration of the old regime and to defend the 
frontiers ; but he none the less sharply censures their excesses. 
He returns to the national tradition in supporting the principles 
of 1789 and condemning the Terror. Taine declared that while 
working at the Revolution he felt himself to be in a madhouse. 
Sorel's figures are human beings, oscillating between motives, 
built of the same stuff as other men. ' Taine,' comments Hano- 
taux in an eloquent passage, ' only sees the blood dropping from 
the scaffold ; Sorel sees it spread over the battlefield to save the 
country and fertilise Europe. The Revolution made the national 
and democratic Europe in which we live.' 

Sorel's judgment of the Revolution is not more admirable 
than his literary art. The canvas is vast, but there is no con- 
fusion or prolixity. He excels equally in the analysis of ideas, 
the refinements of diplomacy, the portraits of men and women. 
His prose is lucid and measured, the perfect instrument of grave 
and elevated thought. The book breathes a deep though 
restrained patriotism, a chastened optimism, a wide tolerance. 
His researches, continuing and in part superseding Sybel, threw 
a flood of light on foreign policy and indirectly on the internal 
situation. Tocqueville connected the Revolution with the history 
of France, Sorel with the history of Europe. His book is at once 
the first adequate study of the Revolution as an international 
event and the fairest judgment of it as an episode in French 
history. 

Ill 

Though generations of students had laboured at the Revolu- 
tion, its documentary study was for the first time seriously 
undertaken during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. 
After attracting attention by a work on the revolutionary 



250 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, orators, Aulard was promoted from Poitiers to a Chair of the 
XIII History of the French Revolution founded for him at the Sorbonne 
in 1886 by the Municipal Council of Paris. The Revolution, he 
declares in his inaugural lecture, did not begin in 1789 nor did 
it end in 1815. All the past prepared and announced it, and its 
life continues both in the world of facts and in the souls of 
Frenchmen. ' Without sympathy one only sees the surface. 
To understand it one must love it. I am a respectful and 
grateful son of the Revolution which has emancipated humanity 
and science.' His ambition was, however, less to judge than to 
reveal. Hardly a third or a quarter of the documents had been 
even catalogued, much less studied. Its diplomacy, unknown to 
Michelet and Louis Blanc, was only beginning to be knov/n. 
The economic history had still to be written, and the life of the 
assemblies and clubs to be reconstructed from the official records'. 
This programme has been carried out with extraordinary energy 
and power by the Professor and his pupils, who founded the 
Societe de l'Histoire de la Revolution and the monthly review 
La Revolution Franpaise. A series of vast publications relating 
to the history of Paris during the Revolution has been issued at 
the expense of the Municipal Council. Of Aulard's own achieve- 
ments the most important relate to the Jacobin Club and the 
Committee of Public Safety. Though the official record of the 
discussions of the club has disappeared, he has reconstructed 
its history from the newspapers and pamphlets of the time. 
He shows how it grew out of the Breton Club at Versailles, and 
how its members, far from being mere automata mouthing the 
formulae of Jean Jacques, were in turn monarchists, Girondins 
and Montagnards. The work on the Committee of Public Safety 
was facilitated by the preservation of the register of discussions 
and resolutions. Greater difficulties arose in connection with 
the correspondence of the Representatives on Mission ; but he 
has collected a vast mass. This colossal publication shows for the 
first time the dreaded Committee at work, and reveals the full 
extent of the internal and external difficulties by which it was 
confronted. Among his other notable documentary works are 
' Paris after Thermidor ' and ' Paris under the Consulate,' in 
which the reports of the police are largely employed. 

Aulard's work as an editor is recognised on all hands to be 
critical and conscientious ; but the writings in which he conveys 
the results of the researches of himself and his pupils have 
aroused sharp hostility and profoundly modified current views of 
the Revolution. The series of volumes entitled ' Lectures and 
Studies on the Revolution ' illustrate many aspects of political, 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 251 

ecclesiastical and diplomatic history ; and it was not till 1902, CHAP, 
after more than twenty years' unremitting study of the original XIII 
authorities, that he ventured on a large narrative work in his 
' Political History of the French Revolution.' The sub-title is 
' Origins and Development of Democracy and the Republic' 
He merely glances at the momentous events of the first three 
years. He has little to say of the Court, finance, economic 
conditions, diplomacy and war. His theme is the evolution and 
application of the two governing principles of the Revolution, 
the sovereignty of the people and equality. He shows how small 
a part was played by abstract ideas, though perhaps he allows 
too little place to the element of passion and to the velocity of 
unchained instincts. The most striking novelty is the demon- 
stration of the late origin of the republican idea. Champion's 
summary of the Cahiers had revealed the moderation of the 
demands of 1789. No one except Brissot and Condorcet asked 
for a republic till the autumn of 1790, and the Legislative was as 
monarchical as the Constituent. The monarchy was overthrown, 
not by republicans, but by its own intrigues. The second con- 
tention is that the horrors of 1792-4 were due, not to Jacobin 
psychology, but to the necessity of repelling the invader and of safe- 
guarding the reforms already achieved. His thesis is that men 
who believed in the principles of 1789 and were grimly determined 
to uphold them acted exactly as might have been expected. 
Without defending the September massacres, he explains the 
state of mind from which they grew — the whole achievement of 
the Revolution at stake, the allied armies advancing towards 
Paris, the boasts of Royalist prisoners that their triumph was 
at hand. They were not the work of the Government nor of any 
responsible authority, but the instinctive action of a section of 
the Paris populace in face of a sudden and overwhelming danger. 
The interpretation of the Terror is of a similar character. The 
men of 1793 were the custodians of the Revolution and of the 
national territory. Against their excesses and cruelties must be 
set the supreme achievement that they saved France both from 
the return of the x\ncien Regime and from invasion. 

Gratitude for the preservation of the Revolution in no way 
involves enthusiasm for all its champions. Marat with his dream 
of dictatorship, Robespierre with his State religion,- were 
reactionaries, and the latter treacherously murdered his mag- 
nanimous comrade, ' the great and good. Danton.' Danton 
towers above all his rivals, and many pages in the ' Etudes et 
Lecons ' are devoted to tracing his career. In an early sketch 
he pronounced him irreproachable in public and private life, and 



252 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, declared that no figure of the Revolution was more moral, more 
XIII human, more pure in regard to money or more free from hate. 
The real hero, however, is the people. The credit for guiding 
the Revolution does not belong to Paris alone. The provinces 
chose the Constituent Assembly, organised the federation of 
1790, and created the republican party in 1792. After the 
decisive victories of 1789 a rift began between the bourgeoisie and 
the masses> and Aulard's sympathies are unreservedly with the 
latter. It was owing to them that the Revolution did not stop 
with the political changes of 1789, and that it came to mean a 
charter of emancipation for the toilers of the world. The 
Directory was a mere bourgeois republic and commenced the 
reaction, while the forward movement was completely checked 
by Napoleon. Self-government came to an end, and the 
separation of Church and State, which had worked well, was 
terminated by the Concordat. A great lassitude settled down on 
all classes, for liberty was dead. The merits of the work are 
conspicuous. 1 It is written with a mastery of the sources that 
no historian has ever approached, and he makes the whole 
drama intelligible. But he is a frank partisan. His hatred of 
monarchy, feudalism and the State Church is only equalled by 
his gratitude to their destroyers. No other competent historian 
has come so near justifying the Terror as a patriotic necessity. 
He is too much out of sympathy with religious ideas to judge the 
Catholic opposition fairly. While Taine proclaimed that men 
are naturally bad and that the best are in the higher classes, 
Aulard teaches that they are naturally good and that the most 
worthy are to be found at the bottom of the social ladder. 

Though Aulard is beyond comparison the greatest living 
authority on the Revolution, valuable work has been accom- 
plished by man}? other scholars. Perhaps the most masterly 
study of any aspect of the period is Chuquet's 2 ' Guerres de la 
Revolution.' His eleven small volumes are based on the archives 
of the War Office and the depots of the districts which formed 
the arena of the war, on newspapers and memoirs, and on a 
careful study of the ground. ' I have tried to make myself 
the contemporary of the combatants and to live with them in 
their camps. I have not written a party work.' He agrees with 
Sybel and Sorel that the Declaration of Pillnitz did not involve 
hostilities ; but it was taken by France as a threat. ' The 

1 An interesting analysis of the work is to be found in Faguet's Dis- 
cussions politiques, 1909. Powerful criticisms came from Wahl, Hist. 
Vierteljahrschrift, 1902, and Glagau, Hist. Zeitschrift, 1903. 

- There is a sketch of Chuquet in Bamberger's Charakteristiken, 1894. 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 253 

Prussian invasion unchained the Revolution and precipitated CHAP, 
it on Europe.' The struggle was bound to come, and France XI11 
and Europe were jointly responsible. ' How can we have 
declared war ? ' exclaimed Lafayette. ' We are ready in no- 
thing.' Confusion, jealousies and distrust abounded; yet the 
soldiers were devoted to the Revolution, which opened military 
rank to the humblest privates. The Prussian army was in no 
better condition, and Brunswick disliked the invasion and 
expected it to fail. The succeeding volumes review the battles 
and campaigns from Valmy to Hondschoote. A serene impar- 
tiality marks the work. He fully appreciates the better qualities 
of Brunswick. He is- more indulgent than Sorel to Dumouriez 
and Custine. The volume on Hoche traces the gradual refining 
of a rough and uneducated man. He recalls how Saint-Just 
re-established discipline and confidence in the army. While 
honouring the heroism of the soldiers, he does not hesitate to 
condemn their excesses. Though war is his main theme, the 
author is equally at home in politics. The volume on Jemappes 
is accompanied by a survey of the revolution in Belgium, that 
on Mayence by a picture of the German Jacobins. It is 
regrettable that a work which wins the confidence of every 
reader should remain a fragment. 

The social and economic history of the Revolution has been 
the object of increasing study during recent years. 1 An ' Eco- 
nomic Commission,' created by the State in 1903, undertook 
the publication of the Cahiers, which in their complete form 
will form a small library. The six volumes, published in the 
' Archives Parlementaires ' at the end of the Second Empire, 
neglected the documents of the villages, which are more valuable 
than the ambitious efforts of the three estates, often drawn up 
by lawyers and in many cases copied from models with a few 
local additions. A second task is the collection of data relating 
to the property of the Church and the Emigres and to the royal 
domain. A third enterprise is to trace the stages of the abolition 
of feudal rights. The condition of the peasantry has attracted 
the attention of Kovalevsky and other Russian scholars, and 
received detailed treatment in the socialist presentations of the 
Revolution by Jaures and Kropotkin. Finance, from Turgot 
and Necker to the end of the Convention, has been explored by 
Gomel, while Sagnac has summarised civil legislation. Aulard 
and Mathiez have thrown light on the revolutionary sects, and 
La Gorce has begun a Catholic narrative of the French Church. 

1 See Boissonade, Les Etudes relatives a Vhistoire economique de la 
Revolution Francaise, 1906, 



254 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. Chassin has collected a vast mass of material relating to the 
XI11 risings in the Vendee, and Ernest Daudet has followed the 
footsteps of the Emigres. The immense success of the scholarly 
anecdotage of Lenotre shows that the attraction of the personal 
side of the Revolution is undiminished. But the main feature 
of recent research is the displacement of the picturesque by the 
study of conditions and ideas. 



CHAPTER XIV 



NAPOLEON 



The unbribed intellect of France opposed the author of the CHAP. 
coup d'etat of 1851, and its hostility is reflected in the historical x * v 
literature of the period. The character and achievements of 
the first Napoleon l became a battle-cry, and strenuous efforts 
were made by friends and foes of the new regime to advance \ 
their principles under cover of historical research. The method 
favoured by the Bonapartists was the publication of new material. 
Baron du Casse, aide-de-camp to King Jerome, published the 
' Memoirs and Correspondence of King Joseph,' followed by 
similar works on Eugene Beauharnais, Jerome and other mem- 
bers of the Imperial family. The Correspondence of Joseph 
suggested to Napoleon the Little an important resolution. Why 
should not the entire correspondence of the founder of the dynasty 
be collected and printed ? As the work was too vast for a single 
editor, a Commission was appointed, on which the Imperial 
family was represented by Prince Napoleon and Walewski and 
scholarship by Sainte-Beuve. The work was completed in thirty- 
two volumes shortly before the downfall of its patron, and a 
magnificent edition de luxe was printed for presentations. Over 
a million francs had been spent on the rehabilitation of Napoleon. 
This immense work, 2 revealing the life of the greatest of historic 
men almost day by day from Toulon to St. Helena, at once took 
its place as the foundation of all serious study. For the first 
time it was possible to survey the whole activity of the diplomat, 
the soldier and the administrator, the principles of his govern- 
ment, the relations with his family, the lights and shadows of 

1 There is a brief summary of Napoleonic studies by Driault in Revue 
des Etudes Napoliiomennes, vol. i., 1912. 

- See the chapter, ' La Correspondance de Napoleon,' in Prince 
Napoleon's Napoleon et ses detracteurs, 1S87. 



256 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, his character. To no ruler except Frederick the Great has such 
XIV a monument been raised. But it was undertaken in the interest 
of the dynasty, not of historical science, and many letters of 
the highest importance were omitted. It purported to include 
everything which had not already appeared and which was not 
too trivial to print ; and it was not till the appearance of supple- 
mentary volumes under the Third Republic that the dishonest 
character of the editing was realised. 

The later volumes of Thiers went far to discount the effect 
of the earlier, and no writer of standing came forth to acclaim 
the uncle of the reigning sovereign. Merimee confined himself to 
Roman history, and Sainte-Beuve disappointed the hopes which 
his acceptance of a seat in the Senate had excited. The enemies 
of the dynasty, on the other hand, were Tar more active. Count 
d'Haussonville showed that though the Concordat was useful 
to the Church, it was not indispensable, as Catholicism had 
already revived and the Churches were open. While the Church 
acquired little that it did not already possess, the civil power 
gained much, and the Organic Articles were fetters on the Pope 
and clergy. Thus the much-lauded Concordat was^ rather the 
subordination of the Church to the Imperial power than a con- 
cession to the religious feelings of the nation. When it was 
discovered that the author was hostile he was forbidden access 
to the archives, which were opened to Theiner in order to 
re-establish the claim of Napoleon to be the restorer of religion. 

The most powerful blow was struck by one of the ablest of 
the journalists to whom the Second Empire was anathema. The 
coup d'etat filled Lanfrey 1 with passionate indignation and 
determined his life. His book on the Church and the Philosophes 
gave expression to his hatred of clerical intolerance and his 
admiration for the generous audacities of the emancipators of 
French thought. His ' Essay on the French Revolution ' attacked 
absolutism in another form, and denounced the theory of 
Rousseau and the practice of Robespierre ; for Lanfrey was a 
Liberal, not a Jacobin. A third volume, on the political history 
of the Papacy, predicted the fate of the temporal power. History 
was for Lanfrey rather a moral than a political problem. Its 
purpose was to warn, to punish, to exhort, to educate. He 
hated the Second Empire with the undying hatred of Victor 

1 See the detailed biography prefixed to the Correspondence de Lanfrey, 
2 vols., 1883. For appreciations see Charmes, Etudes historiques et diplo- 
matiques, 1893 ; J. Reinach, Etudes de Litter ature et d'Histoire, 1889 ; Lot, 
in Revue Historique, vol, i. Cp. La Gorce, Histoire du Second Empire, v., 
451-2- 



NAPOLEON 257 

Hugo and Quinet ; but he recognised that the responsibility CHAP, 
did not rest on the reigning Emperor alone. To strike at Thiers XIV 
was to assault both the First and Second Empires. The article, 
published in 1861, attracted a good deal of attention ; but he 
was aware that the authority of Thiers could not be overthrown 
by a mere criticism of his book. It was necessary to present a 
competing portrait. 

If the ' History of Napoleon ' did not produce the effect of 
Lamartine's ' Girondins,' it must none the less be reckoned 1 
among the influences which contributed to the downfall of the \ 
Second Empire. He allows no extenuating circumstances. The / 
days of glory are as evil as the days of defeat. The idol is swept ' 
contemptuously from its pedestal and shattered into a thousand 
fragments. Brumaire was the brutal overthrow of such liberty f 
as had been left by the Jacobins. The Concordat was concluded \ 
solely in order to strengthen his own power. Pichegru was 
strangled by his orders. The Emperor married Marie Louise 
from vanity and because he wished to exchange an old for a young 
wife. The debt of the Code to the First Consul is a legend. The \ 
Legion of Honour was an instrument of self-aggrandisement. 
The crossing of the St. Bernard was no great achievement. 
Marengo was a defeat for the First Consul, a victory for Desaix. 
His foes, Madame de Stael, Hofer, Schill, Wellington, the 
Spaniards, are exalted. Their desertion of the tyrant softens 
the verdict on Fouche and Talleyrand. 

A work such as this, half history, half pamphlet, could not 

aspire to a permanent place in literature. Napoleon is made to 

carry the burden of his nephew's sins as well as his own. Lan- 

frey's Napoleon is an ogre, not a human being. Such a portrait 

is condemned by history no less than psychology. It fails to 

explain the enthusiasm which greeted his accession to power and 

the immense hold he possessed on the admiration and loyalty 

of France for many years. The book is scarcely stronger in 

research than in judgment. His principal source was the newly 

published correspondence of the Emperor, and he was too ready 

to use such untrustworthy material as the Memoirs of Bourrienne 

and Fouche. On the other hand his narrative of the Spanish 

adventure was a real contribution to history, and his discovery 

that a letter to Murat, published in the Correspondence, was forged 

by >r on himself at a later date cleared up a difficult problem. 

is not without power ; but it lacks colour and lightness 

It has been compared to a keen, searching north 

id both the manner and the matter suggest a cold, 

in autumn when the leaves are falling. Its own merits 

s 



258 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, would never have obtained popularity. A fifth volume appeared 

XIV in 1874 ; but its popularity in France ceased with its utility 

as a party weapon. Thiers' work was a panoramic survey of 

a period, Lanfrey's a splenetic attack on an individual. The 

, authors were equally partial ; but the work of the statesman, 

~> with all its faults, has outlived that of the journalist. 

The indignation excited by Lanfrey's book among the admirers 
of the First Empire was in some degree modified by the knowledge 
that the primary object of attack was Louis Napoleon ; and 
Thiers forgave his critic and sent him to Berne as Minister of the 
Third Republic. Taine's l missile, on the other hand, dis- 
charged many years after the death of the exile at Chislehurst, 
was aimed at the first Napoleon alone. His book is not a 
biography but a psychological study. Unlike Lanfrey, he 
recognises to the full the transcendant genius of the man. He 
I adopts Madame de Stael's verdict that he was more and less 
I than a man. With his hatred of confusion, bloodshed and 
despotism it was natural that Taine should detest the heir of the 
Revolution and the greatest autocrat of modern times. But his 
readers were amazed at the unrelieved shadows of the portrait. 
Like Lanfrey he finds no mark of humanity. Tradition, he 
declares, was nothing to him. He was neither royalist nor 
Jacobin. He lived in utter moral isolation. The only signs of 

! feeling were prompted by the death of his marshals, and they 
were soon forgotten. From beginning to end he was dominated 
by an overmastering egoism. He regarded human beings as facts 
or objects, not as fellow-creatures. He was like a hunter in 
pursuit of his prey. Principles, affection, gratitude, patriotism, 
had no meaning for him, and he believed that they had no 
meaning for others. Nor did he possess the grandeur which 
/ might be looked for in a human embodiment of fate. He 
trembled with terror at Brumaire. He was mean, petty, vulgar, 
utterly lacking in self-control and self-respect, with the worst 
faults of the parvenu. He was restless, loquacious, explosive, 
almost epileptic. Ordinary social intercourse with him was 
impossible, and men who feared nothing else in the world trembled 
when they approached. He told Josephine of his amours, and 
we cannot be certain that he did not seduce his sisters. Under 
other circumstances he would have been a convict and the 
princesses prostitutes. Beneath the Imperial robes we see the 
naked animal. 

It is a revolting picture, and Taine is aware that at first 
sight there may be a difficulty in accepting it. The difficulty, 
1 See references at page 238. 



NAPOLEON 259 

however, is removed by the application of a master-key. He CHAP. 
belonged neither to his age nor to his country. He was not a ^^ 
Frenchman of the revolutionary era but an Italian of the Renais- 
sance, a condottiere born out of due time, a contemporary of the 
Malatestas and the Borgias. That he caused the death of two 
or three million men and left France shorn of the fifteen depart- 
ments acquired by the Republic seemed to the Bonapartists 
less damaging than the assertion that he was not a Frenchman. 
The portrait suffers from the same incurable disability as the 
study of the Jacobins. Taine sees his subject en bloc, and 
allows nothing for the evolution of character and ideas under the 
pressure of events. The lieutenant of artillery is the same man 
as the exile of St. Helena. If there were no other fault the 
portrait would be worthless. But it is equally opposed to the 
sources. ' Ce qui manque,' commented Jules Lemaitre l when 
the volume appeared, ' c'est la silhouette du petit caporal.' 
His pages are filled with quotations from Madame de Remusat 
and Miot de Melito, while friendly witnesses like Meneval and 
Mollien are rarely called. He accepts anecdotes of doubtful 
authenticity, attributes incidents to writers by whom they are 
not recorded, and combines passages from different letters to 
different people. 

The volume fell like a bomb in the Bonapartist camp. 

Princess Mathilde, in whose salon Taine had been for many 

years an honoured guest, shut her doors upon him. Her brother, 

Prince Napoleon, " came forward to defend the memory of his uncle 

and the outraged dignity of the dynasty in his ' Napoleon and his 

Detractors.' The book, he declared, was a libel from beginning 

to end. Taine was an entomologist, intended by nature to 

classify and describe collections of insects with pins through their 

heads. He greedily accepted the tittle-tattle which gathers 

round a conspicuous figure, and had nothing to say of Napoleon 

as the greatest general who ever lived or of the heroic struggle 

of France against the massed might of Europe. The Prince 

proceeds to examine and to discredit his chief informants. 

Bourrienne was a venal wretch, treated by his master with 

culpable indulgence, and his Memoirs contain additions by 

another hand. Madame de Remusat's real view of the Emperor 

is enshrined in her letters, filled with admiration and gratitude. 

Her original memoirs were burned, and those we possess were 

written under the Restoration. Miot de Melito knew the Emperor 

1 ' Taine et Bonaparte,' in Les Contemporains, vol. iv. 

2 A biography is urgently needed. There is a good sketch in Spuller's 
Figures disparues, vol. ii. 

s 2 



260 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, but little, and it is doubtful if the memoirs bearing his name were 
XIV his work. The Prince closes with an impassioned rhapsody on 
his illustrious uncle as the heir of the Revolution, free alike from 
selfishness and ambition, the incarnation of the glory of France, 
the knight without fear and without reproach. The volume 
spoke with the voice of dynastic loyalty, not of historical scholar- 
ship. That such conflicting portraits could be painted showed 
that the study of the Emperor was still in its infancy. Napoleon, 
indeed, had never passed out of politics. Under the July 
Monarchy the tide of feeling ran strongly in his favour, under the 
Second Empire strongly against him. Thiers was a politician, 
Lanfrey a journalist, Taine a philosopher. Historians had 
devoted far less attention to the Empire than to the Revo- 
lution. It was not till the last decade of the century that it 
became possible to know Napoleon as he was. 



II 

No writer has done more to explain Napoleon's personality 
or worshipped him with more passionate and jealous devotion 
than Frederic Masson. 1 As a child he had heard stories from 
the veterans of the Grand Army and had felt their scars with his 
fingers. When France turned her back on the dynasty, he came 
forward with his services. He became the friend of the Prince 
Imperial and the literary counsellor of Prince Napoleon and 
Princess Mathilde. ' I have sung the same song for thirty 
years,' he wrote in 1906. ' The idea of Napoleon is not one of 
those which one takes up and drops at will and with which one 
amuses leisure hours. It is dominating, absorbing, tyrannical. 
Haunted by what will doubtless appear a form of delirium, 
I finger with delight the papers on which his name is inscribed, I 
shiver before his writing. I intoxicate myself with his glory. 
I feel the same satisfaction in unmasking a man who betrayed 
him as a detective in arresting an assassin.' After assisting 
Prince Napoleon with his reply to Taine, he began to pour forth 
that endless sequence of volumes for which he had long been 
collecting material. He commenced with a study of Napoleon 
and the Fair Sex, which was hardly calculated to raise the reputa- 
tion of the hero. Some Bonapartists having attacked him for 
his revelation of the Emperor's weaknesses, he pointed out that 
this was only the first volume of a long series. ' I shall dedicate 

1 For a brief but authoritative appreciation see Sorel, Notes et Portraits 
1909. 



NAPOLEON 261 

my life to him, for everything has shown me more and more that CHAP, 
his history has still to be written. To get to the root of the XIV 
matter I have endeavoured to envisage the man, the son, the 
husband, the lover, the father, the brother. The more deeply 
one studies his history, the greater does one's admiration for him 
become. One can do his memory no greater service than by 
making known the facts of his life. He was a being in whom his 
fellow-men can recognise a brother, for he shared the emotions 
common to mankind.' 

The volume to which this rhapsody serves as preface is 
typical of all his work. His devotion never leads him to suppress f 
disagreeable facts. His position resembles that of the Catholic 
who frankly recognises the existence of blemishes in the Church, 
but never entertains a doubt as to its divine character. He 1 
marshals a formidable array of frail beauties on the stage, and 
suggests that behind them stands an innumerable crowd of the 
unknown and the unnamed. The most attractive chapter is 
devoted to Madame Walewska, the most disinterested woman 
who ever crossed Napoleon's path and the only one whom he 
really loved after Josephine's disloyalty had cooled his passion. 
Masson does not consider that any defence of the amorous hero 
is required. He assures us that he confined himself for the most 
part to women to whom virtue meant nothing, that he paid them 
handsomely and that he never allowed love to conflict with 
business. Indeed by a bold stroke he almost claims Napoleon's 
manifold adventures as a further proof of his superiority to other 
men. ' There was not a note in the gamut of human passion 
that he did not sound. He had as great a faculty for love as 
for thought or action, and was no less extraordinary as lover and 
husband than as warrior and statesman.' The success of the 
book was immense. The theme was of universal interest, the 
style was easy and flowing, the mastery of fact obvious on every 
page. Yet critics called attention to the complete lack of 
references, and the complaint has been repeated on the publica- 
tion of each successive volume. The defence has always been 
that many documents had been given him under the pledge of 
secrecy, that large numbers are in his own possession, and that 
his readers may trust his good faith. His good faith is not in 1 
doubt ; but it is his own fault that his fame is less secure in the 
study than in the salon. 

The second volume of the elaborate portrait to which Masson 
had dedicated his life was entitled ' Napoleon chez lui.' The 
chief need of the time, he declared, was for minute details and 
an exact foundation. ' I, being suspected of having hypnotised 



262 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, myself with Napoleon, must beyond all others abstain from 
XIV polemic and expressions of personal convictions.' This self- 
denying ordinance does not apply to prefaces, for he proceeds to 
denounce the tendencies of the day. ' The nation has now 
reached such a pass that only the religion of the Emperor can 
console it and rehabilitate it in its own eyes. He was the 
Revolution in its sublimity, the Fatherland in its sacredness. 
France has slept for eighty years, a prey to rhetoricians and 
placemen.' Happily there were signs of better times. Prince 
Napoleon's reply to Taine awoke the dormant passion for the 
mighty dead ; and now Marbot had awakened in all hearts a 
generous love for him (Celui) who for twenty years strove for 
France. When we reach the volume itself the historian keeps 
his word and gives us a perfectly objective picture of the daily 
life of the hero. We learn who were his valets, his secretaries, 
his doctors, and how he treated them ; how he made his toilette, 
ate his meals and dictated his letters ; how he talked at receptions 
and attended mass on Sundays ; how the Austrian marriage 
brought a stiffening of etiquette and separated the Emperor still 
further from ordinary mortals. It is a picture of the ordered 
and methodical activity of the greatest worker who ever lived. 

The next stage in the journey, though of less universal interest, 
was of far greater importance to Napoleonic students. The 
youth of the hero was little known except in its general outlines. 
Some valuable material had been published by General Jung 
in 1880 ; but the young Napoleon was revealed to the world in 
Masson's ' Napoleon Inconnu ' in 1895. On the eve of the 
second abdication the Emperor had taken out a bundle of papers 
and written on it ' To Cardinal Fesch.' The dossier found its 
way to Florence, where it rested peacefully till it was discovered 
by Biagi and published by him and Masson. The precious 
packet was found to contain Napoleon's early writings, letters, 
extracts from books, reflections and observations. The two 
volumes are filled with documents, accompanied by a biographical 
commentary. Masson exaggerates the merit and interest of his 
early compositions; but though they offer no foundation for 
a picture of precocious intelligence, they show that he read 
widely and carefully. 

On the completion of ' Napoleon Inconnu ' Masson entered 
on two large tasks, the execution of which ran parallel for many 
years. The first was to portray Napoleon as husband and father, 
the second to trace his relations to the Bonaparte family. The 
former consists of five volumes,the first three of which are devoted 
to J osephine, the fourth to Marie Louise, and the fifth to the King 



NAPOLEON 263 

of Rome. A Beauliarnais legend had grown up, he declared, CHAP, 
and it was therefore necessary to tell the truth and reveal her x * v 
failings. The first volume relates her early fortunes, and ex- 
hibits the superficial character of ' the poor little Creole.' She 
was badly educated, her husband was a man of lax character, 
and the uncertainty of the future made her live exclusively for 
pleasure. The second volume, ' Josephine Imperatrice,' shows 
the same woman, frivolous, sensual and idle. While Napoleon 
was filled with a deep and passionate devotion for her, she laughed 
at his transports and lived in open adultery. He was unfaithful 
to her only after she had been unfaithful to him. Her extrava- 
gance was incurable, and the subject of constant friction with 
her economical master. She filled her place as wife of the First 
Consul with fair success ; but she was never the Empress, and 
though she made herself agreeable she was never respected. 
The busy idleness of her life suggests the cruel phrase that she 
was something of the harem wife. All witnesses agree as to her 
affability and her voluptuous grace ; but she had no culture, 
no belief, no moral rule. The third volume, ' J osephine repudiee, ' 
deals fully with the divorce. Neither husband nor wife, declares 
Masson, ever thought their marriage really binding ; and when 
Napoleon returned from Egypt, enraged by her infidelities, he 
had firmly resolved to divorce her. The pleadings of her 
children postponed the project ; but his desire for an assured 
succession and the birth of a son to Countess Walewska 
finally determined him to take the step he had so long 
contemplated. The parting was affectionate, visits and corre- 
spondence continued, Eugene and Hortense remained attached 
to their step-father, and Josephine took a friendly interest 
in the King of Rome. It was the nemesis of such a 
character that in the lifelong pursuit of pleasure she never 
found happiness. 

Napoleon's second wife was a mere passive agent of other 
men's wills. While some Bonapartists have denounced her for 
treachery to her husband and to France, Masson rightly refuses 
to judge her as if she were French. Only one or two of the hun- 
dreds of letters exchanged between the Imperial pair are in exist- 
ence ; but despite this irreparable loss he draws a vivid and not 
unsympathetic picture. She was devoted to her father and soon 
became genuinely attached to her husband, who treated her with 
marked kindness. A change took place in the atmosphere of the 
Court. Etiquette was stiffened, the Emperor gave more time to 
meals and played games with her in the evening. He saw fewer 
people, opened fewer letters and worked less strenuously. When 



264 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, the days of trial came it was arranged that she should go to 
XIV Vienna to regain her health and join her husband in Elba. 
Correspondence continued for a time, then suddenly ceased. 
The fallen Emperor attributed her conduct to the Austrian 
Court, and continued to speak affectionately of her till death. 
Masson believes that he never knew of Neipperg. Marie Louise 
played her part as well as anyone had a right to expect from a 
commonplace woman confronted with a destiny to which she 
was unequal. The closing volume of the series is devoted to 
the King of Rome. Napoleon, who was supreme as a lover, was 
not less unique as a father. ' Paternal love such as his has never 
been seen so powerful in any human being.' From the birth 
of his son his whole thought was directed to his successor, 
and when his own fall was assured he struggled to save the 
dynasty. The mixture of love and dynastic ambition was 
fatal to the Empire. Napoleon's raison d'etre was the Revolu- 
tion. ' The day when, forgetting his point of departure and 
his mission, he thought himself legitimate, the day he denied 
the Revolution, legitimism devoured him and his Empire, his 
dynasty and his heir.' 

Masson's largest and most important work, ' Napoleon et sa 
Famille,' contains the most damning indictment of his brothers 
and sisters ever penned. No one had ever attempted to trace 
in detail the influence of his affections on his policy and fortunes. 
The weakest as well as the most attractive feature of his character 
was his tenderness for his family, his perpetual indulgence for 
their worst faults, his illusions as to their merits. The early 
contrast between Joseph, idle but dignified, and Lucien, ambitious 
but undisciplined, is finely drawn ; while the escapades of Caroline 
and Pauline prepare us for their gallantries on a larger stage. 
Except Louis, they were all greedy of money, their mother among 
them. As prosperity increased, their mediocrity became manifest 
to every one except the architect of their fortunes. But though 
Napoleon only learned when it was too late that he was relying 
on broken reeds, he soon became aware of their moral iailings. 
' They talk,' said he with biting irony, ' as if I had dissipated the 
patrimony of the late King, our father.' By the side of these 
grasping intriguers the children of Josephine shine with a bright 
and steady effulgence, Hortense affectionate and womanly, 
Eugene loyal and disinterested. 

Joseph, Louis and Jerome became Kings, and Caroline a 
Queen. The Empire became a family institution. Lucien, who 
possessed genuine ability, was in hopeless disgrace, and the 
indolent Pauline was too occupied with her gallantries and her 



NAPOLEON 265 

jewels to care for power. Elisa, handicapped by her ridiculous CHAP, 
husband, never became a star of the first magnitude. Joseph XIV 
played his part in Naples and Spain with statuesque inefficiency, 
while Louis, morbid, obstinate and suspicious, stoutly resisted 
dictation in Holland. Jerome, the spoilt child of the family, 
without mind or morals, played the lord of misrule at Cassel. 
Caroline, dominated by restless ambition, kept her eyes steadily 
fixed on the succession for her husband or her son. But despite 
his perpetual disappointments the Emperor continued to believe 
that no political alliance was likely to be stable unless cemented 
by a family tie. The family system might have served in fair 
weather ; but when storms arose it was doomed to shipwreck. 
While anti-Bonapartist historians applaud the courage with which 
Louis defended his Dutch subjects against exploitation, Massonj 
charges him with ingratitude to the author of his fortunes. 
The Empire, he contends, could only be maintained if the orders 
of its founder were loyally executed, and Napoleon had no 
choice but to depose his recalcitrant lieutenant and to incorporate 
Holland in French territory. 

When a legitimate heir was born, the family system appeared 
less essential ; but with the chance of succession gone, the main 
reason for the fidelity of the King and Queen of Naples dis- 
appeared. Masson believes that they began to intrigue with 
Napoleon's enemies as early as 1811, and suggests that they 
were also influenced by the nationalist secret societies of Italy. 
When the Emperor learned their treachery, his surprise and 
indignation knew no bounds. The defection of Bernadotte, 
Jomini and Moreau was a scandal ; but the treason of Murat 
and Caroline appears to his historian an unspeakable crime. \ 
When the Empire begins to crumble, Masson's admiration 
for the hero is in no way diminished. Fatal errors of tactics 
were committed ; but his faith in military autocracy remains 
unshaken. ' If I hand on the torch of passion that I have 
received, I shall be satisfied ; and if my picture of Napoleon 
gives wings to a salutary ambition, how proud shall I be. Let 
the Liberator come ! Let him sweep away the parliamentary 
orgy where Circe presides, where the pigs, rolling in mud and 
blood, pursue their quarrels.' France lost the hegemony of 
Europe which she had possessed for two centuries, and England 
took it. For its recovery another Napoleon is needed. ' He is 
the incarnation of national policy, as old as France herself. He 
understands all her interests, knows all her needs, shares all her 
aspirations, defends all her rights.' 

No historian has done so much to make the personality of 



266 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. Napoleon known to the world ; * but few of his readers will 

XIV adopt his view of the hero. The bias is so obvious that it loses 

I its dangers. But to do him justice, there is singularly little 

I special pleading in his works. He does not attempt, like Arthur 

Levy, to prove that he was a good man. He admits that the 

seizure of Enghien was a violation of the law of nations, and that 

the family system, on which he built his Empire, was a thoroughly 

false conception. Indeed it may be doubted if his principal 

work has served the Bonapartist cause ; for there must be many 

readers who are driven to ask themselves whether the family 

was not too high a price to pay for the hero. 

Vandal, 2 the second of the triumvirate who effected the 
revival of Napoleonic studies in France, was less productive than 
Masson ; but his work is of higher quality. The policy of France 
in Eastern Europe, the subject of his first efforts, was also the 
theme of the volumes by which he won world-wide renown. 
As early as 1882 he had expressed his regret that she did not 
make the Russian alliance the basis of her policy in the eighteenth 
century ; and he had the satisfaction of publishing the first 
instalment of ' Napoleon et Alexandre I ' 3 in 1891, the year which 
witnessed the rapprochement between the Third Republic and 
the Empire of the Tsars. Its grace and power would under 
any circumstances have secured it a legitimate triumph ; but 
its sensational success was due to its appearance during the years 
when enthusiasm for the Muscovite was at its height. Bignon 
and Lefevbre, Thiers and Lanfrey had explored portions of the 
French archives ; but the Russian archives were nof fully known 
till Tatistscheff and Vandal published their results simultaneously. 
While the Russian begins in 1 801, the French scholar opens with 
Austerlitz and dispenses with detail before Tilsit. They agree 
that the alliance was bound to fail and that the responsibility 
for the breach rests on both sovereigns ; but the Russian's 
admiration for Alexander is greater than that of the Frenchman. 
While Tatistscheff's volume is rather a collection of materials, 
Vandal's work is a superb piece of historical literature, addressed 
to the cultured reader not less than to the Napoleonic specialist. 
A single pregnant sentence announces the author's stand- 
point. ' Throughout his reign Napoleon pursued an unalterable 
goal — to assure by a serious peace with England the fixity of 
his work, the greatness of France and the repose of the world.' 

1 His views are conveniently summarised in his volume, Sur Napoleon, 
Huit Conferences, 1909. 

2 See Segur, Parmi les Cypres et les Lauriers, 1912. 

3 There is a good review in Sorel's Lectures historiques, 1894. 



NAPOLEON 267 

To accomplish this it was necessary to conclude an alliance with CHAP. 
Russia which would guarantee the Continent and leave him free XIV 
to compel Great Britain to recognise his conquests. His reign 
was a battle of a dozen years waged against England, and his 
most crazy projects grew out of the need for defeating the island 
kingdom. Struck by her feebleness he conceived the iniquitous 
plan of stealing Spain from her dynasty ; but the main object 
was to secure another weapon against the foe. Thus the Russian 
alliance is but an episode in a titanic duel. ' At the end France 
falls at the feet of Europe after penetrating and transforming it. 
France has succumbed, but the French idea has triumphed.' 
After thus sketching the background of world politics he intro- 
duces the two protagonists. Napoleon is the impersonation of 
the Latin genius in his radiant clearness, his alert vigour, his 
imagination controlled by logic ; Alexander derives from the 
northern races his lofty and indeterminate aspirations. No 
French historical writing is more brilliant than that which 
describes the meeting of the monarchs at Tilsit and the assembly 
of kings at Erfurt. ' The world is big enough for us both,' 
said Napoleon ; and he proposed to partition it. Russia was 
to have Northern Asia and Constantinople, France to take Egypt 
and India. 

Vandal shows clearly that the alliance was no sooner 
concluded than it began to decay. He demolishes_the legend 
that iUexander was a loyal ally. Of the two the Tsar was 
the least true to his bond. The fascination of Tilsit soon 
lost its spell. Both sides soon began to play a double 
game, each negotiating secretly for alliances with other 
Powers, while Talleyrand busily sowed suspicion between 
them. Alexander stood aside in the Austrian war, and his 
refusal of a Russian princess as Josephine's successor sug- 
gested a waning cordiality. With Marie Louise as Empress of 
France there was less need for the friendship of the Tsar. Though 
Vandal attributes the largest direct share in the breach of the 
alliance to Russia, he confesses that the ultimate responsibility 
rests on Napoleon. Spain haunts Napoleon as Poland haunts 
Alexander, and the misfortunes of both were the indirect con- 
sequence of the abuse of power. ' Let us recognise this provi- 
dential justice which emerges sooner or later from events and 
strikes the guilty.' Napoleon had learned nothing from the 
resistance of the Spanish people, and when the quarrel came to a 
head ' he foresaw everything except the power of resistance 
which the soul of a great people finds in itself.' The narrative 
ends on the eve of the invasion. The alliance carried the seeds 



268 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, of death within itself, for it was based on war and conquest. 
XIV Xhe historian concludes by contrasting the new compact, 
defensive in its character and respectful of the rights of 
other countries. 

Vandal's volumes are as remarkable for their delineations 
of character as for their firm grasp of the tangled skein of dip- 
lomatic intrigue. His famous antithesis, Napoleon c'est faction, 
Alexandre c'est le reve, is scarcely consistent with his own pages, 
which reveal how much of the dreamer lurked in Napoleon and 
how much more than a dreamer was the Tsar, whom his enemy 
in wrath described as a Greek of the Lower Empire. The 
picture of Alexander, beginning as Don Carlos with Czarto- 
ryski as Posa and learning under the stress of repeated defeats 
something of the wisdom of the serpent, is a triumph of psycho- 
logical interpretation. Equally convincing is the portrait of 
Napoleon, dragging the ever lengthening chain of his own 
mistakes. His magic power reconciled France with herself and 
raised the French for a time above the level of humanity ; but 
no one could wish for another such period. Of the minor actors 
Talleyrand and Metternich are sketched with special care. 
Vandal possesses the solidity and breadth of Sorel with an 
elegance and lightness of touch that are his own, while his frank 
delight in the great operatic scenes of history separates him 
from the other members of the French school of diplomatic 
historians. 

Vandal had hitherto busied himself with the external rela- 
tions of his country. He was now to show that he could narrate 
her domestic history with not less power and brilliance. The 
main novelty of ' Napoleon et Alexandre ' was the proof of the 
disloyalty of the Tsar. The main contention of ' L'Avenement 
de Bonaparte ' l was that Brumaire was not the destruction of 
liberty but the restoration of order and prosperity. It was the 
thesis of Thiers revived and buttressed with a hundred new 
arguments. The work opens with a picture of the Directory 
drawn in the darkest colours. Violence continued when energy 
and enthusiasm had disappeared. After the exclusion of Carnot 
France found herself at the mercy of a worthless oligarchy, 
guided by Barras, who was distinguished by moral baseness in a n 
age when base men were not rare. The roads were infested b y 
robbers, corruption was universal, the finances were in disorder. 
Political and religious liberty were unknown, and the press wa s 
in fetters. Everywhere there was lassitude and inertia. It 

1 A cheap edition appeared in Nelson's series in 1912, with an intro- 
duction by Lord Rosebery. 



NAPOLEON 269 

is a picture of tyranny and disorder, degeneration and dis- CH\P 
couragement, all the more striking because Vandal's habit is to XIV 
avoid invective. Such a situation could not last in a country 
which knew by experience how easy it was to change the govern- 
ment ; and Sieyes, who took the initiative, looked round for a 
successful general who would make the coup and become the 
ornamental figure-head of the new regime. His first thought was 
Joubert, and when Joubert was killed his mind turned to Moreau ; 
but at this moment Bonaparte landed in France, and the ovations 
of the people showed Sieyes his instrument. 

If Vandal's first task was to show that Brumaire merely 
executed the judgment of the people on the Directory, his 
second was to sketch the magical transformation which followed 
the establishment of the Consulate. His view of the later years 
of Napoleon is as severe as need be ; but he refuses to allow his 
knowledge of the end to colour his verdict on the beginning. 
Far from destroying liberty — that had been destroyed already — 
he rescued his countrymen from Jacobin tyranny. Though he 
knew little of French politics he learned with extraordinary 
rapidity ; and it was not till Marengo that he felt confident of his 
destiny. One of the most striking features of the book is its 
proof that his uncontested supremacy only dates from his first 
victory as the representative of France. At first Bonaparte was 
called Citoyen, the tradition of republican simplicity was pre- 
served, and Cambaceres and Lebrun took their places beside their 
colleague in the work of government. We see the First Consul 
attending committees and learning his trade. But his main 
principles were already fixed. He declined to associate his 
assumption of power with any form of reaction. Brumaire was 
the work of the moderates of 1789, men who stood between the 
extreme parties as the Politiques had stood between the League 
and the Huguenots. 

From a political point of view Marengo was the most impor- 
tant of Napoleon's battles, with the exception of Waterloo. 
Had he been defeated Fouche and other intriguers were ready to 
overthrow him. Victory led straight to the Consulate for life 
and the Empire. On his return he was greeted with greater 
enthusiasm than had been witnessed since the Fete of Federation, 
and he now began to speak with the tone of a master. The doors 
of the Churches were open already ; but the Concordat was a 
striking homage to tradition and sentiment, and its author hoped 
that it might be a treaty of peace with the Catholic West. A 
second bold step was to allow the majority of the Emigres to 
return. What would have been madness before Marengo was 



270 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, prudence after it. After years of stress and confusion there was 
XIV at last a sensation of convalescence. Robbery was put down 
with a high hand, economy was introduced, the speculators 
whom the Directory tolerated were suppressed, and justice was 
made pure and prompt. The closing chapter is entitled ' Towards 
the Empire.' The people realised how much depended on 
Napoleon's life, and were anxious to escape the return of anarch}^ 
or a Bourbon restoration. Thus, though a despot, he was no 
usurper. He gave France the order which she so urgently needed, 
but neither liberty nor peace ; and Vandal fully sympathises 
with the disappointment of the best minds in France. But he 
asks what man of his time would have acted more generously. 
' He is the pacificator of the French, the restorer of national 
cohesion — that is his incontestable glory. If he had granted 
liberty too he would have shown himself superior to his century. 
It is impossible to say if it was beyond his genius. It was 
certainly beyond his character.' 

Vandal's second great achievement enjoyed the same sensa- 
„ tional success as the first. The style was easy and elegant, 
and the leading ideas stood out in bold relief. No one had 
seriously studied the Consulate since Thiers, and a mass of new 
material, illustrating public opinion as well as the acts of govern- 
ment, had accumulated. Some critics complained that he 
over-estimated the services and statesmanship of Napoleon. 
His father was Postmaster-General under the Second Empire, 
and he himself was a friend of Princess Mathilde and Prince 
Victor Napoleon ; but his acquaintance with the Imperial 
family left no trace in his writings. He wisely refuses to judge 
Napoleon en bloc. He maintains his right, while condemning 
the ' frenzies ' of the Emperor, to applaud the reconstructive work 
of the First Consul. His views as to the late emergence of 
Caesarian ambitions and the originality of the policy of recon- 
ciliation are more controversial. Napoleon is entitled to the 
credit, if credit it be, of the Concordat ; but Madelin has shown 
that part at least of the initiative in facilitating the return of the 
royalists must be attributed to Fouche, and that had it not 
been for the remonstrances of his advisers the Jacobins would 
have had more to suffer. 

The third member of the triumvirate of Napoleonic scholars 
won his early fame in a widely different field. Henri Houssaye,* 
the son of the well-known Arsene, chose classical antiquity for 
his life-work, and while still young wrote a learned life of Alci- 

1 See Madelin's biographical introduction to his posthumous volume on 
Jena, 1912. 



NAPOLEON 



271 



biades. But there was another side of the historian. He had CHAP. 
served with distinction in 1870, and his experiences in defensive -^IV 
warfare in the east of France led him to study the campaign in 
which the hrst Napoleon had fought a losing battle with the 
invader in the same territory. As he proceeded he was filled 
with a great pity and a great enthusiasm. The result of his 
researches was published in 1888 under the simple title ' 1814.' 
Historians had hurried over the interval that separated Leipsic 
from the abdication. It is Houssaye's merit to have recovered 
the history of these months and to have revealed their treasures 
of heroism and devotion. Though the task was hopeless, the 
intrepidity of the soldiers equalled the genius of the captain. 
The desperate struggle is described with the pen of a soldier and 
a patriot. ' I have tried to be impartial,' he declares, ' but 
impartiality is not indifference. Where I see behind everything 
wounded France I have not been able to prevent myself trembling 
with pity and anger. Without taking the part of the Empire 
I have rejoiced at the victories of the Emperor and sorrowed with 
his defeats. In 1814 Napoleon is no longer the sovereign but the 
general, the first of the soldiers of France.' 

Though the volume is almost wholly military, the historian 
does not forget the background. Since the beginning of the 
Spanish campaign and still more since the Russian debacle 
France had been tired of war, and after Leipsic she longed for 
peace. But bleeding and bankrupt as she was, four-fifths of the 
nation neither desired the fall of Napoleon nor even thought of it. 
The opposition came from the liberals, whose irritation was 
legitimate but inopportune. Two years earlier they might have 
stopped the aggression ; now they merely paralysed the defence. 
He contrasts the ardour of the soldiers and the masses with the 
coldness and finally the desertion of the bourgeoisie and the 
upper classes. But though it was impossible to drive back the 
invader,there was no necessity for the restoration of the Bourbons. 
The Tsar, believing that France had no desire for them, was 
prepared to recognise Napoleon II, and only yielded on the 
assurance of Talleyrand and other malcontents that he was 
mistaken. Napoleon had 60,000 men and was prepared to defend 
the capital ; but the defection of Marmont was the final blow. 
The abdication was the work of Frenchmen rather than of the 
invaders. 

The volume, full of life and colour, of heroism and adventure, 
was welcomed with enthusiasm, and its popularity is to-day as 
great as ever. The author's enthusiasm for the leaders of a 
forlorn hope struck a responsive note in the heart of a generation 



272 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, which had known the horrors of defeat and invasion. The 
XIV military narrative deserved the chorus of praise it received ; but 
the political judgments are open to grave criticism. Houssaye 
sympathises so profoundly with the soldiers and their great 
captain that he fails to comprehend the attitude of those who 
opposed them. His fundamental error is to make Napoleon, 
even for a brief campaign, merely the defender of the French 
flag. He sees only the Petit Caporal, the good patriot, the 
friend of the peasant, the victim of treason. He was also the 
ruthless conqueror of Europe, and the campaign of 1814, in 
recording which the historian ' shakes with pity and anger,' 
was the reply of the nationalities to the man whose iron yoke 
they had borne too long. Many Frenchmen believed, as Europe 
believed, that there could be no peace while Napoleon was on 
the throne ; and Talleyrand, the chief villain of Houssaye 's 
drama, has as good a claim to the title of patriot as his old 
master. 

The phenomenal success of ' 1814 ' determined the historian 
to continue his narrative to the fall of the Empire. ' 1815,' 
dealing with the first Restoration and the Hundred Days, was 
almost wholly political. An exhaustive analysis of public 
opinion reveals the hostility of the army and of the masses to 
the Bourbons. The return from Elba is described in perhaps 
the most eloquent chapters that Houssaye ever wrote. On 
reaching the Hundred Days, he sketches the curious outburst 
of Jacobin feeling which the short experience of the Bourbons 
had provoked. The passions of 1793 revived, the hatred of 
priests and nobles returned, and the masses looked to Napoleon 
as the vindicator of the Revolution. He returned less as Emperor 
than as First Consul, the man of the people. ' Je suis issu de 
la Revolution,' he declared, and he set Benjamin Constant 
to draft a Constitution. But the Liberal Empire came too late. 
, Though Houssaye is an uncompromising enemy of the Restora- 
\ tion, he is not able to show that it was really violent or arbitrary. 
1 The government of Louis XVIII was exceptionally mild, and 
there was but little change in the personnel of the administration. 
The unpopularity of the Bourbons was rather owing to little 
things, to mistakes of tact, to the pretensions of the Emigres. 
The picture of the return from Elba and the Hundred Days 
is over-coloured. There was no real popular movement. 
The Emperor himself had no illusions. ' They have let me 
come,' said he to Mollien, ' as they let the others go.' Houssaye 
has no word of blame for the return from Elba. Those who 
welcomed the Emperor are ' patriots,' those who distrusted 



NAPOLEON 273 

and opposed him are ' ultra-royalist.' The historian becomes CHAP, 
more and more Bonapartist as he advances in his task. XIV 

The third volume of the series is devoted to the Waterloo 
campaign. The sketch of the spirit and character of the army- 
is of rare interest. The old troops were gone ; but the new 
were even more eager for the fray. They lacked discipline and 
were therefore liable to panic ; but their hatred of the foreigner 
amounted to frenzy, and they idolised their leader. ' Napoleon 
had never handled an instrument of war so formidable and so 
fragile.' And the Emperor was worthy of his soldiers. Houssaye 
emphatically rejects the contention that his hand had lost its 
cunning and that he was wrapped in lethargy at the crisis of 
his fate. ' His plan was one of his finest strategical conceptions. 
Everything failed owing to defects of execution, some by the 
Emperor himself, far more by his lieutenants.' It was Ney's 
fault that Ligny was not decisive, and it was Napoleon's fault 
that he did not exterminate the English at Quatre-Bras. 
At Waterloo he performed all that was humanly possible. It 
was his intention to have begun the battle early in the morning ; 
but the ground was too wet for the heavy artillery. Had it been 
dry Wellington would have been routed before the Prussians 
arrived. But though Napoleon lacked neither physical nor 
mental vigour, he confessed at St. Helena that he did not possess 
his old confidence. His genius remained, but his courage was 
broken. Even with the handicap of bungling officers and un- 
trained troops the disaster would have been a crowning victory 
had the battle begun at the time the great strategist had planned. 
Thus Houssaye once more plucks consolation from defeat. 

The concluding volume of the series deals with the second 
abdication and the White Terror. The closing book bears the 
title 'France crucified,' and is written at white heat. Burning 
tears drop on the tomb of the gallant Ney. ' Three-quarters 
of the population suffered with horror the insolent yoke of the 
victorious party, the baton of the Prussians and the knife of the 
royalist cut-throats.' Yet in a few years France recovered and 
once more took her place among the great nations. ' With such 
vitality we must never despair. How can we doubt of the destinies 
of a people which has gone from resurrection to resurrection for 
a thousand years ? ' The second restoration was a very different 
affair from the first ; but in scourging the authors of the reaction 
Houssaj^e appears to forget that Waterloo and the White Terror 
were the result of the return from Elba. He has no right to 
heap the whole blame on the Powers and the royalists and to let 
the real author of these calamities go free. His eloquent volumes 



274 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, are a precious contribution to our knowledge of the fall of the 

XIV Empire ; but they find no place among that small class of 

works which satisfy the judgment and the conscience of mankind. 

Ill 

The writings of Masson, Vandal and Houssaye, synchronising 
in their appearance, exerted a profound effect on French opinion. 
Lanfrey was forgotten, and nothing more was heard of Taine's 
audacious contention that the Emperor was an Italian of the 
Renaissance. Masson revealed the man, and though the picture 
was far from pleasing it was at any rate human. Vandal re- 
called the beneficent work of the First Consul. Houssaye depicted 
the Emperor fighting the battle of France against the ruthless 
invader and the hated Bourbons. The publication of Marbot's 
Memoirs in 1891, breathing the very spirit of heroism and romance, 
made the Grand Army live again, and illumined the figure of the 
Petit Caporal by a thousand vivid touches. It seemed as if 
France had only just awakened to the real greatness of her 
adopted son, and writers vied with each other in proclaiming his 
virtues. 

The most fervent of his worshippers was Arthur Levy. 
' Napoleon Intime ' portrays a man whose leading qualities were 
goodness, gratitude and cordiality. The work opens with 
evidence of the hero's loyalty to his family and early friends. 
There were no traces of ambition in early life, and after his first 
sensational successes he forgot neither his family duties nor his 
humble origin. His affectionate nature appears again in the 
romance of his marriage. Had Josephine been faithful to him 
he would have remained faithful to her. It required years to 
persuade him to sacrifice his personal feelings to the national 
interest, and the divorce was as painful for him as for her. Marie 
Louise in turn quickly learned how indulgent and affectionate 
was the Corsican ogre at whose name she had trembled in Vienna. 
His love of children was intense, and they returned his love. His 
relations to his brothers and sisters exhibit him in an equally 
favourable light. The stories of incest were invented to amuse 
Louis XVIII. In his dealings with his officials we find innumer- 
able traits of kindness and consideration. Mollien testifies to the 
patience with which the Emperor listened while he was explaining 
matters of finance. He never changed his servants if they 
behaved honestly. He only had three private secretaries, 
Bourrienne, who was dismissed for flagrant dishonesty, Meneval, 
whose Memoirs are a long paean to his master, and Baron Fain. His 



NAPOLEON 275 

valet Constant remained with him throughout. He was devoted CHAP, 
to Desaix, Lannes and Duroc, and deeply mourned their loss. XIV 
He paid Junot's debts, forgave Bernadotte his early treasons, and 
dealt gently with Moreau. He was never dazzled by his victories 
nor by the magnificent fetes which were demanded by the people. 
His nature inclined to mercy and moderation. Levy finds 
nothing to blame except the death of the Due d'Enghien, which, 
nevertheless, was a proof not of cruelty but of determination to 
assure the safety of the State. There are ugly incidents in the 
hero's life to which no reference is made, and his rejection of the 
testimony of such witnesses as Madame de Remusat and Madame 
de Stael on the ground that their advances had been repulsed is 
unconvincing. But the book is a valuable collection of material 
for the defence. 

A second work, ' Napoleon et la Paix,' essayed the still more 
formidable task of proving the greatest of conquerors a lover of 
peace. The words of the exile at St. Helena were literally true. 
' I only conquered in my own defence. Europe never ceased to 
war against France, against her principles, against myself. 
The Coalition never ceased to exist, either secretly or openly.' 
He fought throughout for the frontiers gained by the Republic, 
and he would have been guilty of cowardice had he surrendered 
what he found. ' Not without misgiving,' writes Levy, ' did I 
discover confirmation of a theory so opposed to the usual notions, 
and of course it is difficult to believe that the great captain hated 
the wars in which he gained so much glory.' If appearances are 
against him, it is only because we fail to realise the policy of his 
foes. ' The immutable rivalry of England, the fear of an im- 
provised dynasty, the hope of putting a barrier to the expansion 
of the ideas of liberty, and the secret ambitions of all the Powers 
— these were the elements of the Coalitions on which his efforts 
for peace were shipwrecked.' His diplomacy was handicapped 
by his trustful nature. ' Nearly all his life he felt a sort of 
respectful confidence in Kings. He almost believed that heredi- 
tary monarchs belonged to a superior humanity.' He needed \ 
many painful experiences to remove the scales from his eyes. 
His deference for legitimate monarchs and his sincere desire 
to avoid war is exhibited most clearly in his relations with 
Prussia. His passionate eagerness for a Prussian alliance was 
flouted by the beautiful Queen, who deliberately chose war.i 
In like manner he was the victim of England's undying hostility 
to France, and he declared at St. Helena that he had always 
desired peace with England by any means compatible with the 

1 This view of the war of 1806 is shared by Lenz, Life of Napoleon. 



276 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, dignity of the French nation. That he aimed at universal 
XIV monarchy is a pure legend. Surrounded by enemies he was like 
a harassed bull, and his only safety lay in rapid strokes. Cet 
animal est tres mediant. Quant on Vattaque, il se defend. 

Levy's work ends with the campaign of Jena, and he is there- 
fore dispensed from illustrating the hero's pacific instincts from 
the incessant warfare of the later Empire. The closing pages, 
however, show how he would confront the problem. The 
dynasties of Naples and Spain were evicted because they violated 
treaties and plotted against France, while Vandal is assumed 
to have proved Alexander the author of the rupture of 1812. ' If 
he had been less devoted to peace and less inclined to respect the 
sovereignty of his enemies, Paris would not have seen Alexander, 
Frederick William and Francis within her gates, all of whom he 
could have deposed.' ' Though I have been called the modern 
Attila and Robespierre on horseback,' said the fallen ruler, ' they 
know better in their heart of hearts. If I were what they say I 
should perhaps still be reigning and they would not. ' The children 
of this world are wiser in their generation than the children 
of light. Levy's work is learned and sincere ; but even paradox 
has its limits. Like his hero he fails to detect the nations behind 
the governments. His portrait of Queen Louisa is a caricature, 
and he forgets that Fox and other Whigs who had stoutly opposed 
the war against the Revolution recognised that enduring peace 
with Napoleon was impossible. It is true that he had to deal 
with a situation that he had not created ; but there was not a 
country in Europe which would not have been glad to live at 
peace with him. 

A modified version of the theory of a pacific Napoleon is to 
be found in the pages of Sorel. The historian had originally 
intended to conclude his work by a rapid summary till 18 15 ; 
but he finally devoted a volume to the Directory and three to 
Napoleon. The latter half of his work is markedly inferior in 
power, learning and judgment to the former, and his ignorance 
of the British archives often leads him astray. 1 ' The problem 
of the natural frontiers is the pivot of the war, and forms till 1815 
the link which connects all the governments issuing from the 
Revolution. France cannot be blamed for trying to realise her 
traditional ambition ; her error was in thinking that her new 
frontier could be held without European recognition or con- 
quering beyond it. Thus the truces of Napoleon never possessed 
any security.' Europe fought to restore the old frontiers, 
France to defend them. ' 1799 is the first operation of a siege, the 

1 See the severe criticisms in Revue d'Histoire moderne, vols, v.-vi. 



NAPOLEON 277 

siege of France, which lasts sixteen years, filled with attacks and CHAP, 
sorties and the construction of distant bastions. In 1812 the XIV 
greatest sortie was made, and the defenders of the beleaguered 
city were driven back from post to post. The war between 
Europe and the Revolution began with Valmy and ended at 
Waterloo.' In its later stages the conflict was degraded by the 
element of personal ambition ; but Sorel ranged himself with 
Vandal and Levy in emphasising the perfidy of the Powers. A 
less pacific picture of Napoleonic diplomacy is now emerging 
from the monographs of Driault. 

In addition to the works of his professed admirers,! Napoleon 
has recently been the theme of several books of outstanding 
importance. Starting with the documents published in 
' Napoleon Inconnu,' Chuquet has collected a mass of material 
relating to his life at Brienne and at Paris, his school-fellows 
and military comrades. Written with serene impartiality the 
1 Jeunesse de Napoleon ' has taken its place as the standard 
authority up to and including Toulon. Of scarcely less im- 
portance is the superb biography of Fouche, in which Madelin 
throws light on almost every stage of Napoleon's career from 
Brumaire to the second abdication. To the cool and sceptical 
Jacobin it was above all due that Brumaire was not followed by 
reprisals, that neither the royalists nor Jacobins were harassed, 
that the rebellion in the West was suppressed, that conspiracies 
were nipped in the bud, that the hostility of the Faubourg St. 
Germain was disarmed. In a different field Lanzac de Laborie's 
comprehensive work, ' Paris sous Napoleon,' presents the first 
adequate picture of the internal life, society and administration 
of the Empire. Original material of great value has come to 
light. Boulay de la Meurthe has collected a vast mass for the 
Concordat, and Prince Murat is publishing the papers of his 
ancestor. Marbot's Memoirs and Gourgaud's journal at St. 
Helena are documents of unusual importance, the first for its 
atmosphere, the second for its facts. The Memoirs of Talleyrand 
proved so lacking in interest that not a few good judges declared 
them a forgery ; and they are at any rate of far less importance 
than the volumes of his diplomatic correspondence published by 
Pallain. A ' Revue des Etudes Napoleoniennes,' under the 
direction of Driault, began to appear in 1912. Yet no French- 
man has written a life of Napoleon incorporating the new 
material, of which the best summaries are to be found in the 
biographies of Rose and Fournier. 

1 For an almost hysterical rhapsody see Georges Duruy's preface to 
Barras' Memoirs. 



278 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 



IV 

CHAP. L v 

XIV Apart from the almost worthless narratives of Capefigue and 

Lamartine, four detailed histories of the Restoration have been 
produced. That of Nettement 1 alone is favourable to the 
Bourbons. The author, an intimate friend of the Comte de 
Chambord and one of the most powerful journalists of the middle 
decades of the century, obtained a good deal of information 
from Berryer and other leading actors. Vaulabelle reflects the 
moderate liberalism of the era of Louis Philippe, and Viel-Castel 
traces the Parliamentary discussions with extraordinary fullness 
from the same standpoint. The ablest of the four narratives is 
that of Duvergier de Hauranne, who played a prominent part in 
the events that he describes. Beginning political life as a 
Doctrinaire, he welcomed the Revolution of 1830 and supported 
the new regime from his place in Parliament ; but he joined the 
opposition when Guizot inaugurated a policy of hard-shelled 
conservatism, and helped to organise the banquets that warned 
the government of the wrath to come. Exiled in 1851 he 
devoted himself to the composition of his history, and lived long 
enough to welcome the Third Republic. His intention was to 
bring his narrative to 1848 ; but when he had reached 1830 he 
found himself an old man. His ten stout volumes possess 
enduring value as a luminous record of the golden age of Parlia- 
mentary eloquence, and Acton declared them to contain more 
profound ideas and more political science than any other work 
in the compass of literature. 

For nearly a generation the reign of Louis Philippe was 
mainly known through the passionate diatribe of Louis Blanc. 
Guizot employed his old age in composing the Memoirs which 
not only offered a detailed defence of his own conduct but 
enshrine the very spirit of the bourgeois monarchy. Not until 
forty years after the expulsion of the last King of France was a 
serious attempt made to narrate in detail the history of the 
reign. Thureau-Dangin places in the foreground of his picture 
what Louis Blanc left in shadow — the Chambers and the Chan- 
celleries. Free government, he declares, was rendered more 
difficult by the revolution of 1830, but not impossible. The 
reign forms part of the Restoration, which, despite its faults, 
gave France both prosperity and honour, peace and ordered 
liberty. He detests republicans, radicals, socialists, free- 
thinkers, Saint-Simonians. Lamtte is savagely attacked, La- 
1 See Bire, Alfred Nettement, 1901. 



NAPOLEON 279 

fayette is disparaged as a senile demagogue, Thiers as the evil CHAP, 
genius of the reign. Even in literature he finds the evil traces XIV 
of ' the sunstroke of 1830.' Hugo deteriorates, Lamartine turns 
politician, Balzac is impure, Eugene Sue vile. He despises the 
people, ' our drunken and ragged masters,' and censures all 
approaches of the bourgeois ruler to his humbler subjects. He 
has little respect for the King, though he warmly recognises his f 
love of peace. The popular origin of the July Monarchy is an 
ineffaceable stain. The historian's favourite statesmen are j 
Casimir-Perier and Guizot, who set their faces like adamant 
against democracy. But he is more conservative than Guizot, 
for he scoffs at ' the illusions of 1789/ and speaks of the impotent 
and destructive anarchy of the Third Republic. ' Everything 
indicates that God reserves for France the inestimable privilege 
of recommencing the experiment which was jeopardised in 1830 
and violently interrupted in 1848.' The work of Thureau- 
Dangin on the Monarchy of July breathes the atmosphere of the 
Faubourg St. Germain ; but he has a keen sense of public affairs, 
and his surveys of foreign policy are masterly. Resting on a 
mass of unpublished material it will hold its own till displaced 1 
by a more impartial review of a period which can only be fairly 
judged by a mind to which political and religious liberalism is 
intelligible. 

The Second Empire has been recently revealed in two works 
of surpassing interest. The voluminous memoirs of Emile 
Ollivier, designated 'L'Empire Liberal,' form a brilliant survey of 
its later years by one of its leading statesmen. The history of 
La Gorce, on the other hand, derives part of its value from its 
complete detachment. ' I have no relation by origin or memory,' 
he declares, ' either to the courtiers of the Emperor or to his 
adversaries.' Napoleon III has suffered first from adulation, 
then from calumny. There is no longer need for either. His 
reign was brilliant and deadly, superficial and tragic. He was 
a mixture of Machiavelli and Don Quixote, whom it is impossible 
to hate. However severe the judgment both of the ruler and 
the man, the impression he leaves is rather of melancholy than 
of anger. The ' History of the Second Republic,' which serves as 
an introduction to the larger work, reveals La Gorce as a royalist 
and a Catholic. The overthrow of the Monarchy produced a"""" 
situation which could not last ; but he condemns the coup 
d'etat of 1851. The bourgeoisie, however, quickly rallied to the 
government, while the rapid development of the material re- 
sources of the country and the rebuilding of Paris kept labour 
employed. The royalists, divided between Legitimists and 



280 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. Orleanists, gave no trouble, and the Church responded with 
XIV enthusiasm to the Imperial advances. ' The clergy,' he writes 
with gentle malice, ' love incense, for the sake of the religion 
they represent, and perhaps unconsciously also for themselves.' 
The Emperor made servitude more popular than liberty. But 
the vestal flame had not been wholly extinguished in 1851, and 
in the early sixties it began to burn with a stronger light. Thiers 
returned to public life, brilliant publicists like Paradol and 
Lanfrey began to voice the discontent, and Sainte-Beuve uttered 
a resounding demand for intellectual liberty. Rationalism and 
radicalism grew rapidly, and even during the glitter of the 
Exhibition of 1867 a feeling of instability was universal. With 
the appearance of Gambetta and Rochefort began a period of 
open war. In a masterly chapter on ' The Decline of the 
Empire ' the historian traces the descent. Sedan merely gave 
the coup de grace to the dying gladiator. 

The work of La Gorce provided the first detailed survey of the 
foreign policy of the Second Empire. He censures the Emperor's 
Italian policy as leading straight to the destruction of the tem- 
poral power. In the study of the relations of the Emperor 
with Prussia he is at his best. While Sybel never censures 
German dealings with France, La Gorce criticises statesmen on 
both sides of the Rhine. He makes no attempt to hide the 
confusion, the weakness, the hesitation, the divided counsels of 
France. He recognises the genius of Bismarck, but denies him 
nobility of character. France deserved to be beaten, but Prussia 
did not deserve to win. The demand for guarantees against a 
renewal of the Hohenzollern candidature was a fatal error. 
When war broke out the bravery of the men was neutralised by 
the inadequacy of the preparations and the incompetence of their 
leaders. While rendering full justice to the generous ideas, the 
personal charm and the humanity of the Emperor, he draws a 
damning picture of his work. One critic declared that the book 
ought to kill Bonapartism. When all allowances are made, the 
Second Empire stands for autocracy and war. The reforms of 
Ollivier, to whom he pays an eloquent tribute, came too late. 
' Splendours and misery — in these two words lies the history of 
the Second Empire.' 

With the events of 1870 we reach a period so recent that 
definitive narratives are impossible. A few valuable mono- 
graphs based on personal knowledge, such!! as Jules Simon's 
volumes on Thiers, Joseph Reinach's study of Gambetta's 
Ministry, Rambaud's sketch of Jules Ferry, Leon Say's volumes 
on finance, the Memoirs of Freycinet and Juliette Adam, throw 



NAPOLEON 281 

welcome light on the early years of the Republic. The five years CHAP, 
following the fall of the Empire have been described by Samuel XJV 
Denis from the royalist standpoint. Hanotaux' detailed narra- 
tive, written in a spirit of moderate republicanism, provides the 
most useful guide through the critical years of the presidency of 
Thiers, the elaboration of the Constitution and the abortive 
coup of 1877. 



CHAPTER XV 



FROM HALLAM TO MACAULAY 



CHAP. In the latter part of the eighteenth century the fame of Gibbon, 
XV Robertson and Hume filled the world ; but interest in English 
history remained very limited. 1 The serious study of early 
England and the presentation of the results of research in literary 
form begins with Sharon Turner, 2 whose ' History of the Anglo- 
Saxons ' appeared between 1799 and 1805. Commencing with 
a sketch of the Britons and the Romans, he proceeds to describe 
the laws, customs and religion of the invaders before their 
conversion, and passes to a picture of the Anglo-Saxon com- 
munities in the centuries before the Norman Conquest — their 
government, laws, religion, agriculture, trade, gilds, coinage, 
language and literature, science and art. The chief value of the 
book lay in its endeavour to reconstruct a civilisation and to 
trace the development of culture. Though greatly inferior in 
narrative power to Hume, Turner's volumes constitute an 
enormous advance in scholarship. Writing in 1820, in the 
preface to the third edition, he declares that his ardent desire had 
been fulfilled. ' The taste for the history and remains of our 
great ancestors has revived and is visibly increasing.' That such 
was the case was in large measure due to his own labours. 

While Turner was busy with his history a far greater man was 
preparing a work from which may be dated the beginning of 
systematic historical study in England. After some years at 
the bar Hallam 3 turned to literature ; but he was forty-one 

1 No serious attempt to relate the progress of English historiography 
has ever been made. There are useful popular sketches in A. J. Grant, 
English Historians, 1906, and Hugh Walker, Victorian Literature, 1910. 

3 See Diet. Nat. Biog. 

3 It is curious that no biography exists. Mignet's dloge, in Eloges 
Historiques, is still the best appreciation, though sadly inadequate. 



FROM HALLAM TO MACAULAY 283 

years old before the ' Sketch of Europe in the Middle Ages,' CHAP. 
published in 1818, made him famous. Though he published a XV 
supplementary volume of notes and dissertations thirty years 
later, the work itself was never seriously revised, and it represents 
the scholarship of the early nineteenth century. Beginning with 
Clovis and ending with the Italian expedition of Charles VIII, it 
covers a thousand years of European history. The preface 
warns us that its chief object is to survey the modes of govern- 
ment and the laws of different countries. A further limitation 
is indicated in a passage which shows that the author was born 
in the century of Hume and Voltaire. He desires to present what 
can interest a philosophical inquirer. ' Many considerable por- 
tions of time, especially before the twelfth century, may justly 
be deemed so barren of events worthy of remembrance that a 
single sentence or paragraph is often enough to give the character 
of entire generations and of long dynasties of obscure kings.' 

Hallam's plan is to deal with the leading countries seriatim, 
reserving for later treatment the problems common to them all. 
Though innumerable corrections were made by the progress of 
research during the author's long life, the survey of England 
remained the best general sketch of the early history of the 
constitution till it was superseded by Stubbs. The chapters on 
foreign countries are of varying merit. Those on France, Italy 
and Spain offered a fairly detailed record, while the sketches 
of Germany and Eastern Europe were curiously meagre. Of 
greater originality were the comprehensive dissertations on 
feudalism and the ecclesiastical power. He is far removed from 
the contemptuous attitude of the eighteenth century ; but he 
loves clerical domination as little as other Whigs, and speaks with 
scorn of the pretensions of Hildebrand and Innocent. The work 
concludes with a comprehensive survey of the state of society and 
literature, education and commerce, which forms one of the 
earliest models of Kulturgeschichte. The picture is dark with_ 
shadows, and the historian confessed in later life that he had 
been perhaps a little too severe. As an attempt to give a more 
adequate sense of the spirit and character of the Middle Ages it 
is scarcely more successful than the endeavour of Robertson ; 
for both were utterly lacking in the sympathetic imagination 
which brings distant ages near and renders the unfamiliar^ 
intelligible. He cultivates a calm, judicial attitude, equally 
sparing of eulogy and invective. He is a philosopher and a judge, 
not an artist nor a reporter. ' He has rather the intelligence 
than the sentiment of the past,' declared Mignet in his sketch of 
a man whose temperament and methods had much in common 



284 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, with his own. There is something in him of the pragmatic spirit of 
XV the eighteenth century. He does not exhibit a drama ; he draws 
lessons. His style perfectly suits the character of his thought. 
Powerful and clear, though lacking subtlety and charm, it occa- 
sionally rises to a grave eloquence. On the other hand, it suffers 
from the ponderous sententiousness which afflicted so many his- 
torians of the time and reached a climax in Palgrave and Alison. 

A third writer contributed to popularise the knowledge of 
the English Middle Ages, and produced a narrative which super- 
seded Hume and remained the most popular sketch of our history 
till the appearance of Green. Lingard l won reputation as a 
serious historian by his 'Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church.' 
Though the object of the book was to glorify the Catholic cen- 
turies, he wrote with a reticence that rendered it palatable to 
Protestant readers. The grounds of his reserve at a time when 
Catholicism was a despised sect were obvious enough ; yet his 
work was hotly attacked by Bishop Milner as calculated to do 
as much harm as good to the Church. His success encouraged 
him to the more ambitious task which filled the remainder of his 
long life. In the preface to the ' History of England,' the first 
three volumes of which extended till the accession of Henry VIII, 
he declared that he had written without consulting modern 
historians, thus preserving himself from imbibing the prejudices 
and reproducing the mistakes of other writers. It gave no 
indication that the author was a Catholic priest, and few of his 
readers would have guessed it. His old foe, Bishop Milner, 
indignantly denounced it as calculated to confirm Protestants 
in their errors ; but the majority of his communion, both in 
England and at Rome, expressly approved his adroitness. His 
object, he wrote to a friend, was to make the Catholic cause 
appear respectable in the eyes of the British public. He is 
studiously reserved in his judgments of people and events, and 
the balanced portrait of Becket shows how different was his 
cool Catholicism from the Ultramontane rigour that came in 
with Pius IX. He has no sympathy with enthusiasm, and 
believes that Joan of Arc was deluded. The book is a purely 
political narrative, and little or nothing is heard of literature or 
society. It was the result of prolonged study, and was enriched 
by researches in the Vatican and other Italian libraries. Later 
editions were greatly improved, and the narrative, though lack- 
ing charm or distinction, afforded a convenient guide to mediaeval 
history. 

1 See the excellent biography by Haile, 1912. The History was abridged 
and continued in 1904. 



FROM HALLAM TO MACAULAY 285 

No real progress could be made without a fuller knowledge CHAP, 
of unprinted sources. The Record Commission was appointed xv 
in 1800 to provide for the better arrangement, preservation and' 
use of the national treasures. The manuscripts were scattered"^ 
about in the Tower, the Rolls Chapel, the Chapter-house oT~ 
Westminster Abbey and other places, unclassified and neglected. 
Rats and mice ruled supreme, and the approach of man was 
discouraged by high fees and galling restrictions. In these 
circumstances the Commission might have been expected to 
make good use of its powers ; but it was doomed to comparative 
sterility by its composition. The Bishops, Cabinet Ministers 
and Privy Councillors who formed a large proportion of its 
members had neither the knowledge nor the leisure to discharge 
their duties with success. It was said that no one who possessed 
any knowledge of history was appointed till Mackintosh joined 
the Commission twenty-five years after its foundation. Docu- 
ments of little importance, disgracefully edited, were published^ 
at enormous cost, and Rymer and other works, of which editions 
akeady existed, were reprinted. In the words of Maitland, 
' the scandalously bad elbowed the admirably good.' 

It was chiefly owing to Harris Nicolas, 1 best known as the 
editor of Nelson's Letters, that public attention was aroused 
to the necessity of drastic changes. His enthusiasm and capacity 
were undoubted, but he was aggressive and passionate. In a 
series of pamphlets he described the mortifying conditions under 
which he had had to conduct his studies. In his ' Observations 
on the State of Historical Literature,' written in 1830 and dedi- 
cated to Melbourne as Home Secretary, he expresses a hope that 
the new reign and the new ministry may inaugurate an improve- 
ment. ' The history of England is not merely imperfect and 
erroneous but a discredit to the country, for almost every new 
document proves the current histories false. Scarcely a state- 
ment will bear the test of truth. The Government prefers that 
the Records should perish rather than that they should be 
allowed to illustrate British history.' The Society of Antiquaries, 
founded in 1751, had not advanced historical knowledge so 
much as a single scholar like Hearne. The Record Commission, 
with greater resources, had accomplished little more. New 
Commissioners must be appointed, and their income should be 
devoted exclusively to the publication of manuscripts of import- 
ance. Largely as the result of his efforts a Select Committee 
was appointed in 1836, with Charles Buller as Chairman. The 
evidence given by Nicolas himself, Tytler and other witnesses 
1 See Diet. Nat. Bios. 



286 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, convinced the Committee of the urgent need of collecting, 

XV cleaning and classifying the records and facilitating their use. 

A new Commission was appointed, and from 1836 dates the more 

careful stewardship and more rational use of our incomparable 

heritage. 

•' fJ! The best work of the Record Commission had been accom- 
plished by Palgrave, 1 whose practice of the law was accompanied 
by a passion for antiquarian research. His edition of the ' Par- 
liamentary Writs ' received discriminating praise from Nicolas. 
But the critic complained of the needless expense incurred in 
the publication, and a split ensued between the two scholars. 
Appointed Deputy-Keeper in 1838, he collected the treasures 
hitherto dispersed in many places into a single repository. In 
addition to publishing a mass of original matter, Palgrave 
wrote works of a more general character. ' The Rise and Progress 
of the English Commonwealth,' published in the year of the 
Reform Bill, was the first comprehensive study of our early con- 
stitutional history. It was the author's intention to bring his 
story down to the Stuarts ; but the two massive volumes devoted 
to the period before the Conquest had no successors. Savigny's 
epoch-making treatise on the survival of Roman law had been 
finished some years earlier ; but the English historian declared 
that he had reached his results before he read the German jurist, 
and independently of the remarkable work of John Allen, the 
friend and secretary of Lord Holland, on the growth of the Royal 
Prerogative. Allen showed that the theory of royal power was 
the same in all the nations which grew out of the Empire. This 
absolutism derived from Rome, not from the Teutonic tribes. 
But the prerogative in England was never monarchical in the 
continental sense, and there was a wide gulf between Teutonic 
practice and Roman theory. Though Palgrave defends his 
originality, he pays his predecessors a handsome tribute in the 
preface. ' Two learned men have thrown new light on the origin 
of laws and government in Europe. Savigny clearly demon- 
strates the existence of Roman communities far on in the Middle 
Ages, and Allen has shown how much of our monarchical theory 
is derived from the government of the Empire.' Thus the note 
is struck on the very threshold which revealed him as one of the 
most uncompromising ' Romanists ' of the century. 

Palgrave gave an entirely new construction to Anglo-Saxon 
history. He boldly challenges the current view that it is neces- 

1 A biography is badly needed. See Diet. Nat. Biog. His theory of 
English institutions is excellently sketched in the introduction to Vino- 
"gradoff's Villainage in England, 1892, 



FROM HALLAM TO MACAULAY 287 

sary to begin with political events and to proceed to institutions CHAP, 
and law. ' The history of the law is the most satisfactory clue ~"~ XV 
to the political history of England. The character of the people 
mainly depends on their laws.' He speaks of law with religious 
reverence. ' The function of the lawgiver is the highest 
exercised by man. Legislation is a duty perhaps involving the 
most fearful responsibility which can devolve on any human 
being.' The English Monarchy derives from the monarchical 
power of Rome and the limitations of Teutonic practice. It was 
the Roman element which saved us from becoming a nation of 
loose aggregates ; it was the Teutonic element which delivered 
us from absolutism. Of limiting influences the most important 
were the free judicial institutions. Again, the shires, hundreds and_ 
townships were not mere administrative divisions but political 
bodies. Such was the framework of society, and such it remained 
despite invasions and changes of dynasty. The barbarian invaders 
of the Roman Empire changed only the forms of villainage. 
The disappearance of the language of the Britons no more proves 
the destruction of the British than the disappearance of the Celtic 
language in Gaul argues the destruction of the Gauls by the Franks. 
The invasions of the Danes and Normans left even fewer traces. 
Mediaeval England was built on Roman foundations. Palgrave's 
volumes were bold and ingenious. His belief in continuity 
rested on his conviction of the vis inertiae of social conditions ; 
but, though powerful and erudite, he is arbitrary and fanciful? 
He sees Rome everywhere, and shuts his eyes to the traces of - 
the Teuton. The arrangement of his material could not be worse. 
The first volume begins with chapters on the Roman Emperors, 
and the second, described as ' proofs and illustrations,' should 
have been called, as the Edinburgh Review suggested, ' supple- 
mentary thoughts.' 

Palgrave's later and larger work, ' The History of Normandy 
and England,' was in some respects a continuation. No history 
of the duchy had yet appeared, and no one, he asserted, could 
write it unless he possessed the key. ' A dead set has been made 
against the Middle Ages as immersed in darkness and barbarity, 
and most of all against mediaeval Christianity.' But, while they 
had been unjustly depreciated by Protestants and rationalists, 
they were now suffering scarcely less from injudicious defenders. If 
a balanced attitude was the first condition of success, the second 
was a clear appreciation of the influence of Rome. ' The doctrine 
on which all real understanding of mediaeval and modern history 
depends is the deduction of authority from Rome and the continu- 
ity of the European States.' Thus the historian's second work, 



288 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, no less than the first, is a variation on the theme of Rome. He 
XV begins with a detailed history of the Carolingian Empire, and 
passes to the fortunes of the Norsemen before Rollo's settlement 
in Normandy. The second volume is devoted to the early 
dukes, and the third brings the story to the Norman Conquest. 
The fourth deals with Rufus and discusses the results of the 
Conquest. The work was interrupted by death in 1861, and the 
history of the Conquest itself was never written ; but the author's 
view of its character was fully explained. In direct opposition 
to Thierry, he regards it as scarcely more than a change of dynasty . 
The Englishman champions the Normans as warmly as the French- 
man had championed the Saxons. He shows that the transfer 
of land was less complete and the fusion of races far more rapid 
than Thierry allowed. Such changes in law as were introduced 
were the work, not of the Conqueror , but of Henry II. Palgrave's 
volumes were of service in revealing the Norman dukes and in 
correcting Thierry's perverse conception of the Conquest ; but 
they possessed a further merit. In discovering that the Roman 
Empire did not terminate in 476, he seized the key to mediaeval 
history. ' Rome's cruelties, baffling conception by their infinity, 
her vices, her absolute hatred against God, received their chastise- 
ment,' he writes in his opening chapter ; but no one admired more 
than he her political genius. No part of his work is better than 
that which treats of the Carolingian Empire and its successors. 
' When drawn within the magic circle of Imperial Rome,' declares 
Freeman 1 with truth, ' he rises to his full power.' 

The faults of the work are even more conspicuous than its 
merits. Its style is intolerable. He is garrulous, sententious, 
verbose. The story opens with four bombastic pages on ' the 
stream of time.' He was ignorant of the last and greatest art, 
the art to blot. His nemesis is that his books are unread and 
that his services to historical study are almost forgotten. A 
second fault is the uncritical use of authorities. Palgrave, unlike 
Thierry, is accurate in the rendering of his texts, but he is no judge 
of the value to be attached to them. It is true that he overthrew 
the False Ingulf, who had led Thierry astray ; but he pays equal 
attention to authorities of very different value. Again, he concerns 
himself too exclusively with the history of institutions and rulers 
and too little with the national life. Even more than Hallam he 
surveys human evolution through a lawyer's spectacles. Yet, 
despite his many faults, he occupies an honourable place among 
the pioneers. ' He would have been a great commander,' writes 
Maitland in his picturesque way, ' if an army had been forth- 
1 Edinburgh Review, April 1859. The authorship is unmistakable. 



FROM HALLAM TO MACAULAY 289 

coming. We had our swallows, and beautiful birds they were ; CHAP. 
but there was spring in Germany.' XV 

If Anglo-Saxon England owed something to Palgrave it 
owed far more to Kemble. 1 At Cambridge he was the friend of 
Arthur Hallam, the Tennysons, Maurice, Sterling and Milnes ; 
but he left without taking a degree. His main interest at that 
time lay in action, not in learning. ' He is engrossed by a passion,' 
wrote his sister Fanny, ' which occupies his mind and time to 
the detriment, if not the exclusion, of all other studies.' He 
adored Bentham, and advocated the ballot, disestablishment 
and other advanced proposals. In a word, he was in ' a sort of 
frenzy about politics.' In 1830 he and a few friends went to 
Spain to help Torrijos in his ill-fated rising. On the conclusion 
of the tragic adventure he threw himself into Teutonic philology, 
and studied under Grimm. The main task of his life was to 
collect Anglo-Saxon charters and with their aid to reconstruct 
the social and political life of early England. His ' Codex Diplo- 
matics ' contained about fifteen hundred documents in chrono- 
logical order from the conversion of Ethelbert to the Norman 
Conquest, collected from collegiate, cathedral and other libraries. 
A good many had already been printed by Rymer, Hearne and 
other scholars ; but whenever possible they were transcribed 
afresh. ' The stores of knowledge here laid open to the philo- 
logist, the jurist and the antiquarian,' he proudly declared, 
' will produce results far beyond the limits of this country or 
age.' The Charters supply information concerning the law of 
real property, the nature of tenure, the authority of the King, 
the nobility and the Church, while household arrangements and 
the disposition of real and personal estate are known by the Wills. 
The chief merit of the work lies rather in the vast collection of 
material than in his treatment of it. ' Kemble was a great man,' 
pronounces Maitland, ' but, even according to the standard of 
his own time, not a very good editor of legal documents.' 

' The Englishman has inherited the noblest portion of his 
being from the Anglo-Saxons. In spite of every influence, we 
bear a marvellous resemblance to our forefathers.' It is in this 
spirit of whole-hearted Germanism that Kemble wrote his 
greatest work. ' The Saxons in England ' appeared in 1849, 
with a dedication to the Queen. The picture was mainly based 
on his own Codex and on Thorpe's collection of Laws. The 
work is not a narrative but a series of essays, each complete 
in itself, on institutions, classes and problems. Almost every 

1 See Diet. Nat. Biog. He often appears in Fanny Kemble's Records of 
a Girlhood, 1878. See also Vinogradoff s Introduction. 



290 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, aspect of society is presented, and a chapter on Heathendom 
xv sketches the intellectual background of the invaders. The dust 
of the workshop is often visible ; but the volumes are full of new 
material and new views, and form by far the most important 
contribution to the study of early England before Stubbs. 
Partly by an inquiry into local names, he shows that the Teutonic 
conquest began long before the recorded settlements. He agrees 
with Palgrave that the invaders easily conquered the Celts and 
did not destroy them. But the root of the social system of Anglo- 
Saxon England was the mark, which the invaders brought with 
them. As they were relatively few, they divided only a part of 
the land they had conquered, the rest remaining in the hands 
of the people under the title of Folkland for future use. Feudal- 
ism was born when this reserve fell to a few magnates. Free 
men could then no longer obtain fresh holdings, and had to seek 
subsistence from a lord. Thus land was the basis of political 
and social relations, both during the reign of free communities 
and when they were replaced by the manor. Neither Britons 
nor Romans left a trace in the life or institutions of their 
successors. The demonstration that Anglo-Saxon England was 
essentially Teutonic was irresistible ; but the picture of the social 
structure was marred by grave errors. The mark, so far from 
being the type of settlement, was the exception. The conception 
of folkland as unoccupied territory held in trust was purely 
Tanciful. On the other hand, his acquaintance with the charters 
enabled him to throw light on almost every province of law. 
Though his book is rather an encyclopaedia than a history, it 
dominated English scholarship for a generation and may still be 
consulted with profit. Introduced into Germany by Konrad 
Maurer, it exerted an enduring influence on Teutonic students of 
mediaeval institutions. 



II 

The success of Lingard's volumes on mediaeval England was 
surpassed by their successors, which brought the narrative to the 
Revolution of 1688. He excuses himself from personal judgments 
on the ground of ' my occasional ignorance of motives and 
causes, my inexperience in what is called the philosophy of history, 
but which has often appeared to me the philosophy of romance. 
Where the authorities are silent, I prefer to leave the reader to 
exercise his own judgment.' In describing the origin of the 
Reformation in Germany he admits the existence of grave abuses, 
and condemns the Papal bull against Henry VIII as vindictive ; 



FROM HALL AM TO MACAULAY 291 

but the addition of the headship of the Church to the headship CHAP 
of the State debased the spirit of the people and led to passive XV 
obedience. He impartially condemns tyranny and cruelty 
whenever he finds it. ' The foulest blot on Mary's reign is her 
cruel persecutions of the reformers. The mind is struck with 
horror, and blesses the legislation of a more tolerant age.' In 
dealing with Mary Stuart he refuses to take sides, and in regard 
to Elizabeth he is hardly more pronounced. Protestants say 
her reign was happy, Catholics that it was a time of national 
misery. But though he refuses to judge the reign as a whole, he 
pronounces the Queen irresolute, mean and irritable, and suggests 
that her personal morality was bad. 

The volumes on the Stuarts reveal the same cautious spirit. 
' A suspicion has existed that I may occasionally be swayed 
by religious prepossessions. Nothing can be more easy than to 
throw out such insinuations ; but I am not aware that any ; 
important error has been discovered.' He declares Laud and ' 
his enemies 'equally obstinate, equally infallible, equally in- 
tolerant.' The death of Charles I was ' an awful lesson to royalty 
to watch the growth of public opinion and to moderate its preten- 
sions in conformity with the reasonable desires of its subjects.' 
Yet the victorious Puritans move him to stronger language than 
he usually permits himself. The conquerors of Wexford and 
Drogheda are ' ruthless barbarians.' Cromwell himself was 
overbearing, selfish, ambitious, and regarded dissimulation as the 
perfection of human wisdom. The eighth volume, appearing 
in 1830, completed the narrative with a guarded vindication of 
James II. Lingard's volumes presented the first modern narra- 
tive of the two critical centuries of English history. His religious 
attitude was that of a Gallican, his political standpoint that of 
a Whig. John Allen, in repeated attacks in the Edinburgh Review, 
charged him with suppression and perversion of facts. Hallam 
praised his acuteness and industry, but deplored his inveterate 
partiality. He was a partisan, declared Alison, but nobody 
concealed his partialities more skilfully, his bias appearing not 
in what he told but in what he concealed. Southey's criticism on 
the Reformation volumes swelled Tnto his ' Book of the Church.' 
On the other hand, the perusal of his work was the main factor 
in the conversion of Phillips, the eminent German canonist. His 
tone gradually became more outspoken. He confessed that 
as he had to acquire credit among Protestants he was extremely 
cautious in the first edition of his work, and that when he had won 
it he introduced matter respecting the penal laws and other 
topics which he at first withheld. He attributed to his book ' the 



292 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, revolution in the Protestant mind as to the doctrines of Popery.' 

XV He improved his work as new editions were demanded, and 

enjoyed the satisfaction of seeing it both abridged and translated 

into several languages before his death in 1851 at the age 

of eighty. 

4 The first work on modern England of national and inter- 
, national importance was Hallam's ' Constitutional History from 
the accession of Henry VII to the death of George II.' Written 
-while the Tory domination was still unbroken, it constituted a 
political manifesto. In a vitriolic article in the Quarterly Review 
Southey denounced ' its acrimony and its arrogance, its injustice 
and its ill-temper.' l But Hallam belonged to the extreme right 
of the Whig party. He detested political and ecclesiastical 
tyranny ; but he had no confidence in the wisdom of the people, 
and the Reform Bill, though the work of his intimate friends, 
went too far for his taste. His work is a sustained attack on 
the Tudor and Stuart despotism and a glorification of the 
principles of 1688. Hume was forgotten, and Tory views of 
the seventeenth century were almost universally abandoned. 
At the moment when the Reform Bill inaugurated a generation 
of Whig politics, he inaugurated a generation of Whig history. 
His influence was increased by the moderation of his tone and 
the austerity of his style, which has been compared to that of a 
State paper or the judgment of a great magistrate. 

Hallam naturally applauds the work of ' the majestic lord 
who broke the bonds of Rome.' Yet Henry figures in his pages 
as an able and ferocious despot, ' one of the many tyrants and 
oppressors of innocence whom the wrath of Heaven has raised 
up and the servility of man has endured.' Cranmer finds but 
little favour in his eyes. The Marian persecutions are condemned 
scarcely more severely than the cruel punishments of the Catholics 
by her sister. The Tudors were all arbitrary despots, and it was 
not till the conflict on monopolies at the close of the reign of 
Elizabeth that popular opinion began to assert itself. The 
Reformation was a beneficent movement carried through by 
worldly and selfish men. To a lover of law the Tudors were 
almost as offensive as the Stuarts ; but to their subjects the yoke 
of the latter was far less tolerable. Hallam had no sympathy 
with Puritanism as a religious movement ; but he was a whole- 
hearted supporter of the resistance of the lawyers and the country 
gentlemen to the encroachments of the monarchy. Never had 
such a staggering blow been delivered at Personal Government. 

1 Hallam angrily resented the attack. See Smiles, John Murray, 
vol. ii. 263-4. 



FROM HALL AM TO MACAU LAY 293 

Lingard had mildly condemned the obstinacy of the first two CHAP. 
Stuarts, Brodie and Godwin had inveighed fiercely against xv 
their despotism. But the grave and measured denunciation of 
the cold-blooded apostasy of Strafford, the intolerance of Laud 
and the incorrigible insincerity of their master, exerted a far 
more profound effect. The attempt of Isaac Disraeli to rescue 
the character of James and Charles left public opinion wholly 
unmoved. Speaking with a weight and an authority which no 
English historian had approached, Hallam delivered judgments 
from which there appeared to be no appeal. Yet he is by no 
means an unqualified admirer of the conduct of the popular. _ 
party. He would have preferred the perpetual banishment 
of Strafford. He considers that Charles' power for mischief was 
broken in 1641 and that there was no need to resort to arms. He 
condemns the execution of Laud and the King. 

In the light of subsequent research it is precisely this part of 
Hallam 's celebrated treatise which is the most imperfect. He 
believed that there was a definite Constitution to break, and 
that the first two Stuarts broke it. In point of fact there were 
only precedents pointing in different directions. Parliament 
possessed the power of legislation and the virtual control of 
supplies ; but the continuous direction of foreign and domestic 
policy had always been regarded as the function of the Crown. 
Prerogative was not the enemy of law but a supplementary power, 
covering matters for which the law did not specifically provide ; 
and in the test battles between Crown and Parliament the legal 
right was not always on the side of the latter. The Whig his- 
torian loves the Commonwealth and Protectorate little more 
than the Stuart despotism. ' He is a hanging judge,' declared 
Macaulay. ' His black cap is in constant requisition. In the long 
calendar there is hardly one who has not, in spite of evidence 
to character and recommendations to mercy, been sentenced 
and left for execution.' He recognises Cromwell's achievement 
in making England once again a Great Power ; but he depicts 
him as a selfish despot of the Napoleonic type, and laments that 
he ' sucked the dregs of a besotted fanaticism.' On the other hand, 
he describes with delight the conservative revolution of 1688, 
and his discussion of that event forms a classical exposition 
of the Whig doctrine of government. A detailed account of 
the working of the newly-defined constitution under William was 
followed by a brief survey of the reigns of his three successors. 
The 'Constitutional History' is beyond question one of the, 
strongest works in English historical literature. It became and 
has remained a text-book in the Universities, was quoted as an 



294 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, oracle in Parliament, and was studied as a guide by the youthful 
^ v Victoria and her Consort. It was translated into French under 
the auspices of Guizot, and was inwardly digested by the friends 
of constitutional liberty all over the world. 

If Hallam was the first authoritative exponent of Whig 
historical philosophy, Macaulay l was its most popular and most 
eloquent interpreter. It needed some effort to master the 
"three volumes of the ' Constitutional History,' in which 
comment clogs the narrative, and laws and theories of 
government overshadow men and women. But everyone who 
read at all could read Macaulay ; and those who shirked the stout 
volumes of the History could distil his views from a dozen 
sparkling essays. Together they shaped the opinion of the 
world till Ranke and Gardiner lifted the seventeenth century 
high above the strife of Whig and Tory. 

Like Thirlwall and the younger Mill, Macaulay showed extra- 
ordinary precocity. He wrote a ' Universal History,' essays and 
poems while other children are in the nursery. It was as difficult 
for him to forget as for other people to remember. On one 
occasion he wrote out a list of the Senior Wranglers, with their 
dates and colleges, for a hundred years. He declared that any 
fool could say his Archbishops of Canterbury backwards. He 
once remarked that if every copy of ' Paradise Lost,' ' The 
Pilgrim's Progress ' or ' Sir Charles Grandison ' were destroyed, he 
could reproduce them from recollection. His interest in politics 
came later, but was not less keen. The Evangelicals who fre- 
quented his father's house at Clapham were mostly Tories ; but 
at Cambridge he learned to detest the Tory Government, and he 
left the University a convinced Whig. His first publications 
dealt with classical as well as modern themes. The Roman and 
Athenian sketches and the exquisite ' Conversation of Cowley and 
Milton on the Civil War ' already revealed the power and ease of his 
style. With the appearance of the essay on Milton in the Edin- 
burgh Reviei& in 1825 the world became aware that a star of 
the first magnitude had arisen. The extensive and lightly borne 
knowledge, the wealth of allusion, the clear-cut judgments on men 
and events, the dazzling brilliancy and rapid force of the language 
were a revelation. ' The more I think,' said Jeffrey, ' the less I can 
conceive where you picked up that style.' The great Whig organ 

1 See Trevelyan's biography and Cotter Morison's volume in the 
English Men of Letters, 1882. Among the innumerable appreciations may 
be mentioned Morley, Miscellanies, vol. i. ; Leslie Stephen, Hours in a 
Library, vol. ii. ; Bagehot, Literary Studies, vol. ii. ; Herbert Paul, Men 
and Books. Macvey Napier's Correspondence, 1879, contains much 
material for Macaulay. 



FROM HALLAM TO MACAULAY 295 

had secured not only an accomplished essayist but a powerful CHAP, 
recruit for its campaign. Milton the politician is championed xv 
with not less enthusiasm than the author of ' Paradise Lost.' 
The first blow was struck at the Stuarts by the writer whose life 
was to be devoted to attacking their fame, and Cromwell was 
assigned a place beside Washington and Bolivar. If the article 
was too cocksure on grave questions of politics and taste, the 
defect was scarcely noticed by a generation which was accustomed 
to the uncompromising expression of opinion. 

Four years later Macaulay explained his conception of the 
task of the historian in an essay entitled ' History.' l To be a 
really great historian, he declared, was perhaps the rarest of 
intellectual distinctions. There were many perfect works of 
science, poems and speeches ; there was no perfect history. 
Herodotus was a delightful romancer. Thucydides was the 
greatest master of perspective, but he was not a deep thinker. 
Plutarch was childish, Polybius dull. No historian ever showed 
such complete indifference to truth as Livy. Tacitus was the 
greatest portrait-painter and the greatest dramatist of antiquity, 
but he could not be trusted. Modern historians, on the other 
hand, were stricter in their notions of truth and superior in 
generalisation ; but their bias led them to distort facts. Hume 
was a vast mass of sophistry. Brodie, who replied to him, 
was little better. Southey wrote for the Anglican Church, and 
Lingard for Rome. Gibbon hated the Church, Mitford the 
Athenians. While they were busy with controversy, they 
neglected the arts of narration. Facts were the mere dross of 
history. The ideal historian must know how to paint as well 
as to draw, and must embrace the culture as well as the 
actions of mankind. 

This programme was carried out in the ' Essays,' of which some 
are of permanent value while others are only redeemed from 
oblivion by their dazzling style. The best are concerned with 
English history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 
Of these the essay on Hallam was among the earliest and most 
important. Under cover of a review, Macaulay takes occasion 
to deliver a violent attack on the Tory version of English history. 
The denunciation of Cranmer is almost as vigorous as that of 
Strafford, the ' insolent apostate.' He pronounces the whole 
life of Charles I a lie, and declares hatred of the liberties of his 
subjects to have been the ruling principle of his conduct. He 
brushes aside Hallam's criticisms of the action of the Long 
Parliament. He confesses to a more unmitigated contempt for 
1 Not republished by the author with the Essays. 



296 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. Laud, ' a ridiculous old bigot/ than for any other character in 
XV our history. He condemns the half-hearted prosecution of the 
war in its early stages, and it is only when we reach the last scene 
in 1649 that he utters a protest. Though no lover of Puritanism, 
his eloquent eulogy of the character and policy of Cromwell 
prepared the way for Carlyle. A dark picture of the Restoration 
leads up to the Revolution of 1688, ' glorious ' for William alone. 
The essay on Hampden covers part of the same ground, but is 
written with greater restraint. The portrait of James I is in 
the historian's worst style ; but that of the stainless hero reveals 
Macaulay's reverent admiration for the man who shares with 
William the chief place in his affections. The essay on Mackintosh 
embraced the reign of James II and offered a reasoned defence of 
the Revolution. The studies of Horace Walpole and Chatham 
showed that his knowledge of the eighteenth century was not 
inferior to that of the seventeenth. The essays written after his 
return from India are weightier and less polemical. That on 
Temple is the ripest, and the second essay on Chatham is a. mas- 
terpiece of portraiture. Of still greater merit is the biography of 
, i?itt, written many years later for the ' Encyclopaedia Britannica.' 
Not all the English essays reach these lofty altitudes. Macaulay's 
knowledge of the times before the Stuarts was scanty. That on 
Burleigh is a thoroughly mediocre performance, and the ' Bacon ' 
was the most dramatic failure of his life. If the discussion of the 
Baconian philosophy, with its caricature of idealism and its 
philistine utilitarianism, is fatal to his fame as a thinker, the 
political narrative is scarcely less indefensible. The philosopher 
is exalted beyond all reason, the statesman debased beyond all 
justice. Though Spedding l swung the pendulum too far in the 
other direction a few years later, he at least exposed the glaring 
injustice of the essayist. 

The two great Indian essays, written shortly after his return 
from Calcutta, are among the most magnificent of Macaulay's 
achievements. While every schoolboy, he complained, could date 
the leading battles of European history, few Englishmen knew 
even the names of the victories by which their race had won a 
foothold in Asia. Of the two ' Clive ' is the more accurate, but 
the less popular. The career of the lad who left an office stool 
to command armies in the field, won the battle of Plassey, rose 
to a dizzy height of fortune, was prosecuted by his countrymen 
for embezzlement and died by his own hand, was full of the 
colour and romance which he loved. s But ' Warren Hastings ' is 

1 His Evenings with a Reviewer, two vols., 1848, were a sustained 
attack on the Essay. 



FROM HALL AM TO MACAU LAY 297 

perhaps Macaulay's most brilliant work. It set in the foreground CHAP, 
of national history the great proconsul whose achievements *•* 
were almost forgotten. The conflict of the Governor-General with 
his Council on the one hand and the Indian potentates on the 
other provided a rich store of dramatic interest. The ruses by 
which British power was built up, the struggle with the Begums 
of Oude, the tricking of Nuncomar, follow each other in rapid 
succession. Over the scene broods the glamour of the opulent 
East, with its curious customs and its glowing hues. The 
diabolical cleverness of the proconsul paves the way for the 
trial scene in Westminster Hall and the avenging thunderbolts of 
Burke. Yet, though the picture of Hastings is perhaps the most 
dazzling work of art in the author's gallery, it is one of the most 
inaccurate of his portraits. While Hastings owes his celebrity 
to Macaulay, his fame had to wait for vindication at other hands. 
His knowledge of Continental history was limited, and he loses 
his sureness of touch when he embarks upon it. The essay on 
Machiavelli is almost as much a political dissertation as an 
historical study. The story of the War of the Spanish Succession 
is redeemed by glimpses into the council-chamber of Anne. The 
essay on Ranke's ' History of the Popes ' does not deserve its 
reputation. In contrasting the skill with which the Papacy 
appropriated new movements with the blundering pedantry 
which drove forth Wesley, he overlooks the failure of Rome to 
prevent the Reformation. The essay on Frederick the Great is 
among the worst of his writings. 1 The caricature of Frederick 
William I is based on the memoirs of Wilhelmina, which are 
employed without a suspicion of their untrustworthy character. 
The King, he declares, could be best described as a cross between 
Moloch and Puck. Writing before the appearance of Ranke's 
' Prussian History,' he cannot be blamed for failing to realise the 
significance of the founder of Prussian administration ; but he 
might have caught at least a glance of the virtues hidden below a 
rough exterior. The portrait of Frederick is scarcely more true 
to life. His worst traits are selected and exaggerated. He is 
presented as a man of bad heart, a tyrant without fear, without 
faith and without mercy. To dub Frederick a tyrant was to 
misconceive the ' enlightened despotism ' which was one of the 
most characteristic features of the century, and to forget that 
the discipline won in the hard school of autocracy helped to build 
up a powerful and healthy State. 
\J.i Macaulay did not invent the historical essay, he found it 

1 For German wrath see Hausser's Ges. Schriften, vol. L, and Du Bois- 
Reymond, ' Friedrich II in Englischen Urteilen,' Reden, vol. i. 



298 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, of brick and left it of marble. His articles glitter like diamonds 
XV in the dusty pages of the Edinburgh Review. To compare his 
contributions with those of Sydney Smith, of Jeffrey or of 
Brougham is to measure the gulf which separated the old style 
from the new. What Shakespeare's plays achieved for the 
fifteenth century, Macaulay's essays accomplished for the 
seventeenth and eighteenth. He was the first English writer to 
make history universally interesting, and it is from him that 
most of his countrymen still derive their enduring impressions. 
A traveller in Australia recorded that the three works he found 
on every $quatter's shelf were the Bible, Shakespeare and the 
' Essays.' iThe inscription on his monument in the chapel of his 
old college, Ita scripsit ut vera fictis libentius legerentur, is not 
only true, but is true of him alone. A work which appeals to 
men of all races, and which has held its own for three generations, 
must possess extraordinary merits. The secret of his power is 
that he is the most fascinating story-teller who ever wrote 
history. He has been called the Rubens of historians. He was 
a supreme dramatist, with the dramatist's instinct for heighten- 
ing the colour and winnowing the essential from the unessential. 
His tableaux linger in the memory as if one had seen them on 
the stage. In vividness of presentation he equals Carlyle and 
Michelet, and surpasses all other historians. Entering Parlia- 
ment in 1830 and reaching at a bound the front rank of orators, 
he understood the spirit of Parliamentary government as no 
great historian before or after him. His dramatic power was 
accompanied by inexhaustible stores of knowledge, which enabled 
him to enrich his narrative by a thousand vivid touches and 
illustrations. 

^.vlf the dramatic instinct, experience of political life and 
boundless knowledge went to the making of his best essays, 
*the decisive factor in their success was style. To a generation 
accustomed to ponderous solemnity or a slipshod accumulation 
of facts, his style, rapid, sparkling, transparent, came like a 
draught of water to a thirsty man. It is sometimes better 
suited for an oration than an essay, and the coruscating eloquence 
becomes turgid and oppressive. Ossa is heaped upon Pelion 
till we groan beneath the load. The panegyric on Athenian 
culture in the early essay on Mitford would have been a wonderful 
piece of declamation, but in cold print it is almost nauseating. 
JTo read Macaulay is to take a rapid walk in a bracing air. It is 
' immensely stimulating, but it is not a form of exercise that suits 
every constitution or every time of life. In their high spirits, 
their assurance, their sumptuous pageantry, the ' Essays ' are the 



FROM HALLAM TO MACAULAY 299 

work of a brain essentially young, and they appeal with the CHAP. 
greatest force to the budding mind. ~ XV 

Their imperfections are obvious. The omniscience of 
Macaulay is a legend. His store of knowledge was amazing, 
but there were gigantic gaps in it. His mastery of classical 
literature was superb ; but he knew practically nothing of the 
Middle Ages, except Dante and Petrarch, and even in English 
history before Elizabeth his equipment was that of the average 
cultivated man. His familiarity with the growth of Continental 
States was small. A master of the literature of England and the 
Latin South, he knew little of that of Germany. His acquaint- 
ance with religious and philosophic thought was extraordinarily 
limited. He never grasped the notion that the human mind has 
gone through great changes in its conceptions of the universe, 
and he was strangely ignorant of the patient scholarship which 
created historical science while he was writing his books. A 
second limitation is his political bias. Most of his essays ap- 
peared in a review the main object of which was the propaga- 
tion of certain opinions. He is the greatest of party writers, not 
the greatest of historians. To apply the same standards to his 
essays as to those of professional scholars is to do him injustice. 
A political manifesto must not be judged by the same canons 
as a scientific treatise. There is no affectation of neutrality OT 
indifference. • He honestly believed that Whig principles repre- 
sented the alpha and omega of political wisdom. To the end of 
his days he was the man of 1832. Thus the most brilliant of 
English historians is one of those who possess the least weight. 
■ A third imperfection of the ' Essays ' is their sledge-hammer 
brutality. The most kind-hearted of men was a truculent con-^ 
troversialist. He lays about him like a prize-fighter. Like a 
giant rejoicing in his strength, he dealt staggering blows at his 
opponents. His admiring friend Mackintosh declared that he 
failed in little but the respect due to the abilities and character 
of his opponents. Melbourne wished that he was as cocksure 
about anything as Macaulay was about everything. Some of 
the most offensive phrases were omitted or softened when the 
' Essays ' were republished in 1843 ; but the winnowing process 
was not very severe. ' I have beaten Croker black and blue,' 
he wrote, delighted at the opportunity of turning his review of 
an edition of Boswell into a furious attack on a political op- 
ponent. He lived to do public penance for his onslaught on 
the elder Mill ; but he was rarely troubled by such qualms of 
conscience. The essays on Southey and Sadler, Barere and 
Robert Montgomery, are full of boisterous invective. He loves 



300 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, exaggerated phraseology. The verses of Frederick the Great 
xv were ' hateful to God and men.' ' We are tempted to forget the 
vices of Laud's heart in the imbecility of his intellect.' In 
comparison with the labour of reading Nares' ' Life of Burleigh ' 
the treadmill is an agreeable recreation. With such a tempera- 
ment there is little place for light and shade, and truth is bartered 
for a telling phrase or a sounding epithet. A final disability is 
the lack of insight into certain types of thought and character. 
His downright temper and simple, straightforward nature made 
it difficult for him to understand complex and subtle personalities. 
He was too convinced of the finality of the outlook of his time — 
' the most enlightened generation of the most enlightened people 
that ever existed ' — to penetrate the mind of other ages. Carlyle 
tersely described him as ' an emphatic, really forcible person, but 
unhappily without divine idea.' The notes on his keyboard 
were few, the range of his emotional experience curiously limited. 
He had no sympathy with the passionate discontent of the dis- 
inherited or the yearnings of the mystic, and he frankly despised 
the speculations of philosophers from Plato downwards. He 
jyas neither a thinker nor a prophet, but a humane and cultured 
Philistine. 

The college essay on William III showed that the personality 
of the Deliverer had already made a deep impression on the young 
Whig, and the essays on Hallam and Mackintosh gave fervid 
expression to his admiration. In 1838 he planned a history 
of England from the Restoration to the death of George IV, and 
in 1839 he began to write. When the Melbourne Government 
fell in 1841 he expressed a hope that he might remain long enough 
in opposition to bring his narrative down to the death of Anne. 
But the labour proved far greater than he had anticipated. He 
gave up writing for the Edinburgh Review, refused the Chair 
of Modern History at Cambridge, and devoted himself wholly to 
his task. When death came suddenly in 1859 he had not reached 
the end of William's reign. The republication of the ' Essays ' in 
1843 revealed the size of his public, and the ' inexhaustible 
demand' encouraged him in his labours. On launching the first two 
volumes in 1848 he wrote with manly pride, ' I have had the year 
2000, and even the year 3000, often in my mind.' ' I shall not be 
satisfied,' he wrote to Macvey Napier, ' unless I produce some- 
thing which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable 
novel on the tables of young ladies.' The ambition was fully 
realised. There had been nothing like it since 'Waverley.' The 
book was translated into the language of every civilised country, 
and honours poured in from foreign academies. Except for a 



FROM HALLAM TO MACAULAY 301 

bitter attack by his old enemy Croker in the Quarterly, critics CHAP, 
of all schools joined in a chorus of congratulation. Even Alison, XV 
though pronouncing it one-sided, hailed it as a noble book. 

The period selected had never been systematically explored. 
On his return from India in 1812 Mackintosh had undertaken 
researches for a history of England from 1688 to 1789, and had 
been allowed by the Regent to consult the Stuart Papers. But 
the claims of politics and society, added to the task of compiling 
a popular History of England for Lardner's ' Cabinet Cyclopaedia/ 
retarded his progress,- and the fragment published after his death 
only covered the reign of James II. The work was warmly 
praised by Macaulay, though he was compelled to admit that 
there was too much disquisition and too little narrative. The 
success of the History was fully deserved. Though on the whole 
less dazzling than the ' Essays, 'most of which were struck off with 
amazing rapidity, it was a far greater achievement. 1 It is the 
work of a riper mind, the unabated vigour of youth combining 
with a new and welcome maturity. England, he declared, had 
need of both the historic parties. There is much more learning 
and thoroughness. He wrote slowly and took infinite pains 
both in collecting and shaping his material. ' He could not rest,' 
records his nephew and biographer, ' until every paragraph con- 
cluded with a telling sentence, and every sentence flowed like 
running water.' He found his reward in the enjoyment of his 
readers, among them men who read little else. A vote of thanks 
to him was carried at a meeting ' for having written a history 
which working-men can understand.' He was particularly 
gratified to learn from a reader in the printer's office that there 
was only one expression in the two volumes of which he did not 
catch the meaning at a glance. Twenty years of study went to 
compose the narrative of about the same length of time. Though 
only a fragment of the complete design, it is none the less the 
greatest historical work in the English language since Gibbon. 
' It will be my endeavour to relate the history of the people as 
well as the history of the government, to trace the progress of 
useful and ornamental arts, to describe the rise of religious 
sects and the change of literary taste, to portray the manners 
of successive generations.' This generous programme is faith- 
fully fulfilled, and the history owes part of its popularity to it. 
The famous third chapter, on the condition of England in 1685, 
supplied a background to the drama. While the 'Essays' revealed 
a rare power of concentration, the success of the History depended 
on having plenty of elbow-room. It is the limitation of his 
1 See the forthcoming edition by Professor Firth, 



302 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, method that it can only be applied to a short period, and one in 
XV regard to which information is plentiful. 

After a rapid survey of English history before the Restoration, 
a brilliant chapter on the reign of Charles II and a panoramic 
view of the country, the detailed narrative starts with the acces- 
sion of James II. Opening with the expedition of Monmouth and 
the Bloody Assizes, and culminating in the attack on the Univer- 
sities, the trial of the seven Bishops, the coming of William and 
the flight of James, the story is a continual succession of arresting 
scenes. The volumes on James II end with an eloquent paean to 
the Revolution of 1688, written under the shadow of 1848. ' It 
was a revolution strictly defensive. In almost every word and 
act may be discerned a profound reverence for the past. Of all 
revolutions the least violent, it has been of all revolutions the most 
beneficent. Its highest eulogy is that it was our last revolution. 
For the authority of law, for the security of property, for the 
peace of our streets, for the happiness of our homes, our gratitude 
is due, under Him Who raises and pulls down nations, to the 
Long Parliament, to the Convention and to William of Orange.' 
Seven years later two volumes on William III made their appear- 
ance. The heroic soul tried by a thousand vicissitudes, the cold 
exterior concealing a heart full of tenderness for his wife, for 
Bentinck and for Keppel, the complete subordination of self to 
the interests of Protestant Europe, combine into the most 
wonderful portrait Macaulay ever painted. Beside his towering 
figure even the best of the politicians appear puny and selfish. The 
preparation for these volumes was even more arduous than for 
their predecessors. ' I will first set myself to get, by reading and 
travelling, a full acquaintance with William's reign. I must 
visit Holland, Belgium, Scotland, France. The Dutch and French 
archives must be ransacked. I must see Londonderry, the 
Boyne, Aughrim, Limerick, Kinsale, Namur again, Landen, 
Steinkirk. I must turn over hundreds,thousands of pamphlets.' 
The programme thus noted in his journal was faithfully carried 
out. To this direct knowledge of the localities the History 
owes much of its vitality. Where all is brilliant, the siege of 
Londonderry and the massacre of Glencoe shine with peculiar 
lustre ; while the origin of the National Debt, the foundation 
of the Bank of England and the expedition to Darien form little 
monographs of skilful workmanship. 

The History is a psean to the Revolution and to its principal 
author. A more critical generation adopts Macaulay's view of 
the blessings of 1688, but it regards the actors in the drama in 
a somewhat different manner. A few years after he laid down 



FROM HALLAM TO MACAULAY 303 

his pen the greatest of modern historians traversed part of the CHAP, 
same ground. Ranke l contended that the Whigs to whom XV 
Macanlay attributed the merits of the Long Parliament of 
Charles II were hardly a separate body, and contested the 
picture of the Tories as ultra-clerical and ultra-monarchical. 
They urged war with France and arranged the marriage of 
Mary and William, both opposed by the Whigs, and they were as 
ready to fetter James as their opponents. They talked less of 
the right of resistance, but when the danger came to Church 
and Constitution they were as eager to defend them. Nor can 
Macaulay's portrait of James, of whom he speaks throughout 
with contemptuous loathing, be accepted. The picture of 
William suffers from excess of light, and the attempt to wash 
off the stain of Glencoe is a failure. 

The exaggeration of virtues and defects and the inability 
to understand certain types of character reappear in the History. 
Marlborough is ' a prodigy of turpitude ' — a miser, a profligate, 
a traitor, a murderer. In the words of John Paget, 2 who sub- 
mitted the portrait to a searching analysis, ' documents are 
suppressed, dates transposed, witnesses of the most infamous 
character paraded as pure and unimpeachable, forgotten and 
anonymous slanders of the foulest description revived.' The 
plan of the descent on Brest, the betrayal of which is described 
as ' the basest of all his hundred villainies,' was already well 
known to Louis XIV. The Duchess appears as a shrew without 
talent or character. George Fox is pelted with abuse in the 
worst style of the early essays. The treatment of Penn as a 
liar and a sycophant aroused justifiable resentment in the Society 
of Friends. Aytoun sprang to the rescue of Dundee. Babington 
published a detailed reply to the picture of the character and 
social status of the clergy. Macaulay was at all times too ready 
to accept as evidence whatever he found in the pamphlets and 
broadsheets of the day. Speaking of the volumes on William III 
Mill 3 declared them pleasant reading, but not exactly history. 
' He aims at stronger effects than truth warrants, and so carica- 
tures many of his personages as to leave it unaccountable 
how they can have done what they did. What a difference 
between him and Grote, who is less brilliant but far more interest- 
ing in his simple veracity, and because, instead of striving to 
astonish, he seeks to comprehend and explain.' ' Four hundred 

1 The treatment of the period by the two historians is well discussed 
in Noorden's article, ' Ranke u. Macaulay,' Hist. Zeitschrift, vol. xvii. 

2 The New Examen, 1861, a powerful and interesting work, 

3 Mill's Letters, vol. i., 188-9, 1910. 



304 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, editions could not lend it any permanent value,' wrote Carlyle 
XV in his journal, ' there being no depth of sense in it, and a very 
great quantity of rhetorical wind.' These defects arose from 
habits of thought, not from want of knowledge ; but Macaulay's 
grasp of an important aspect of his subject was limited. His 
picture of the revolution of 1688 is too insular. Where he 
supplies new material, as in the Triple Alliance, the treaty of 
Dover, Barillon's negotiations with the Opposition and the peace 
of Ryswick, he never goes very deep or grasps all the threads. 
Here again Ranke's European vision supplements the work 
of his predecessor. A final criticism must be hazarded. He 
describes but does not explain. No historian of the front rank 
has shown himself so blind to the invisible world of thought and 
emotion, or made less effort to fathom the depths on which the 
pageantry of events floats like shining foam. 

The combined efforts of Hallam and Macaulay rescued the 
critical century of English history from the dominion of Hume ; 
but Toryism found a new champion in Alison. ' I was induced 
to adventure on a history of Europe during the Revolution,' he 
wrote, 1 ' by the clear perception that affairs were hurrying on 
to some great social and political convulsion in this country. 
The passion for innovation which had for many years overspread 
the nation, the vague ideas afloat in the public mind, the facility 
with which Government entered into these views — all these had 
awakened gloomy presentiments in my mind.' The first volume 
appeared in 1833, the tenth in 1842. The preface is a singularly 
frank statement of his political and religious philosophy. ' If 
there is one opinion more than another impressed on the mind 
by an examination of the French Revolution, it is the perilous 
nature of the current into which men are drawn who commit 
themselves to the stream of political innovation.' Happily the 
follies of men are checked by a stronger hand. ' The actors 
were overruled by an unseen power, which rendered their vices 
and ambitions the means of vindicating the justice of the divine 
administration, asserting the final triumph of virtue over vice, 
and ultimately effecting the deliverance of mankind.' The 
narrative breathes the same spirit of uncompromising Toryism. 
The Revolution was an outburst of anarchy, purely destructive 
in its principles and results ; and, like other violent outbreaks, 
it tended to effect its own cure. ' From the death of Louis XVI 
a reaction in favour of order and religion began throughout the 
globe.' Among its champions was George III, ' who never lost 
power with the thinking few.' The work closes with a hundred 
1 Autobiography, 2 vols., 1883. 



FROM HALLAM TO MACAU LAY 305 

pages of moral reflections. ' Democracy cannot exist and never CHAP, 
has existed for long in an old society. It must either destroy XV 
the community or be destroyed itself.' 

The ' History of Europe,' naively described by the author as 
a great effort in favour of the Conservative cause, became the 
bible of the Tory party, which found in it the comfort it needed 
during the early years of the reformed Parliament. It was not, 
however, its Toryism which procured it world-wide popularity 
for more than a generation. Alison himself rightly attributed his 
success to the surpassing interest of his subject and his priority 
in the field. Readers could afford to overlook his platitudes in 
return for the first comprehensive survey of the most eventful 
years in modern history. No library in England or America 
was deemed complete without the massive volumes of the 
Scottish magistrate, and foreign translations carried his message 
all over Europe. But the rising tide of democracy and the 
growth of disinterested historical science gradually sapped his 
fame. A continuation of the History to the coup d'etat of Louis 
Napoleon lacked the dramatic interest of its predecessor. Soon 
after the author's death in 1867, the ' History of Europe ' began 
to be banished to the topmost shelf, and a little later to the dusty 
recesses of the second-hand bookshop. 

One of the acts of Alison's colossal drama was described in 
greater detail and with very different authority by Napier. 1 
The ' History of the Peninsular War,' in which he received 
assistance both from Wellington and Soult, is the finest military 
history in English and perhaps in any language ; but it reveals 
a bias as pronounced as that of Alison or Macaulay. ' The 
Spaniards have boldly asserted, and the world has believed, that 
the deliverance of the Peninsula was the work of their hands. 
This assertion I combat.' The primary cause of the downfall of 
Spain, he declares, was the union of a superstitious Court with 
a sanguinary priesthood. They were cruel and bigoted, ignorant 
and boastful, and the unmitigated ferocity they displayed in the 
war was disgraceful to human nature. The French, on the other 
hand, excite his admiration, for they were so brave that only 
British soldiers could defeat them. Though he charges Napoleon 
with guile and tyranny, he pronounces him the greatest man 
in history, the most wonderful commander, the most profound 
politician. He expresses frank admiration for Soult and other 
French generals. The hero of the book is Sir John Moore. 
Even the Portuguese receive a tribute. The strong feelings of 
the author, however, rarely affect the value of the military 

1 For the extensive literature provoked by his book see Diet. Nat. Biog. 

x 



3 o6 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, narrative. The pictures of Albuera and the other battles and 
XV sieges in which he took part are more vivid, though far more 
concise, than those which Kinglake, his only serious rival, was 
to paint of the Crimea. It is the book of a soldier who teaches 
that war is the rule of the world, and that from man to the 
smallest insect all living things are at strife. 

In addition to the writings of Hallam and Macaulay, Alison 
and Napier, which were read all over the world, useful works 
were produced which appealed rather to students than to the 
great public. James Mill's 1 ' History of British India,' described 
by Macaulay during the debates of 1833 as ' on the whole the 
greatest historical work which has appeared in our language 
since that of Gibbon,' required a considerable effort to read. 
The subject was little known, the treatment extremely detailed, 
and the tone of the work disagreeably censorious. The Utili- 
tarian philosopher described with scant sympathy a society 
which rested on caste and tradition. At a time when'Sir William 
Jones had encouraged an excessive admiration for Hindu 
civilisation, Mill's sociological survey of the laws and institutions, 
manners and arts, religion and literature of the Indian peoples 
came as a bitter draught. But the judgment of the Company 
and its agents was no whit less severe. He spoke modestly of 
his ' heavy volumes.' The want of personal knowledge of India, 
which he maintained was an aid to impartiality, deprives it of 
touches which might have softened its rigid outlines. Sympathy 
and imagination are conspicuously lacking. The value of the 
work lay in its mass of information and its analytical power. It 
took rank among the classics of its time, and won him a place in 
the India House. Revised and continued a generation later by 
Horace Wilson, it remained canonical for two generations and 
was adopted as a text-book for candidates for the Indian Civil 
Service. On the other hand, in 1882, Max Miiller 2 declared it 
responsible for some of the greatest misfortunes that had 
happened to India, even with the antidote against its poison 
supplied by Wilson's notes. 

No writer of the age of Hallam and Mill was so unwearied in 
the publication of new material as William Coxe. His lives of 
the Walpoles, Marlborough and Pelham are still indispensable 
to the student of the eighteenth century, while his massive 
histories of the House of Austria and the Spanish Bourbons 
opened a new field of study. Though utterly lacking in narrative 

1 See Bain, James Mill, 1882, and Leslie Stephen, The English 
Utilitarians, vol. ii. 

2 India : What can it teach us ? Lecture ii. 



FROM HALL AM TO MACAULAY 307 

power and literary instinct he was a conscientious editor, and CHAP, 
his works formed a rich quarry from which abler men were to XV 
draw. More popular in treatment, though based on considerable J 
study of manuscript sources, were Agnes Strickland's ' Lives of 
the Queens of England ' and Tytier's ' History of Scotland/ the 
latter undertaken at the instigation of Walter Scott. A thoughtful 
and comprehensive ' History of England during the Thirty Years' 
Peace ' was compiled by Harriet Marti neau. 



X 2 



CHAPTER XVI 

THIRLWALL, GROTE AND ARNOLD 



CHAP. Classical literature had been more generally studied in England 
XVI since the Renaissance than in any other country, and the first 
history of classical times with any pretensions to scholarship was 
written by an Englishman. On discovering that his friend 
Mitford 1 was a lover of Greek literature, Gibbon suggested that 
he should write a history of Greece. The work was begun without 
reference to the problems of the day, and the first volume 
appeared in 1784 ; but when the French Revolution broke out 
the historian used his work to strike at the Whigs and Jacobins. 
To those who admired the freedom of the Greek republics and 
asserted that their institutions were best calculated to produce 
happiness, he replied that it was a complete mistake to suppose 
that they secured well-being in the country of their origin. 
Security of person and property was unknown, the rulers were 
dominated by jealousy and greed, and society rested on a slave 
basis. Sparta, the best of the States, made no pretence to 
democracy. For Mitford democracy is despotism. He pre- 
ferred the Persians, the Carthaginians and the Macedonians to 
the Greeks. He eulogised the Tyrants, while eagerly swallowing 
every scandal about democrats and demagogues. He naturally 
sides with Macedon, and denounces Demosthenes as a coward 
and a rogue. ' Mitford,' writes Freeman, ' was a bad scholar, a 
bad historian, and a bad writer of English. Yet we feel a lingering 
weakness for him. He was the first writer of any note who 
found out that Greek history was a living thin^ with a practical 
bearing.' A still more severe critic pays him a similar tribute. 
Nearly all modern historians of Greece, declared Macaulay, 3 

1 See the memoir in vol. i. of the edition of 1837. There are some 
interesting judgments on Mitford and his successors in Mahaffy's Intro- 
duction to the English translation of Duruy's History of Greece, 1892. 

2 ' Mitford' s History of Greece,' in Miscellaneous Essays. 



THIRLWALL, GROTE AND ARNOLD 309 

divested men of individuality and made them mere types ; from CHAP, 
this grave fault Mitford was free. But this was his only merit, XVI 
and it was itself in part the result of his unbridled partisanship. 
The book owed its success mainly to its political bias. The 
Tories quoted it as a generation later they quoted Alison. 
' Mitford,' wrote Macaulay in 1824, ' enjoys a great and increas- 
ing popularity. He has reached a high place among historians 
without being challenged. He should have been attacked on 
the appearance of his first volume. To oppose the progress of 
his fame is now almost a hopeless enterprise.' The slashing 
article delighted the Whigs ; but it availed little against an 
established reputation, and a second edition, revised by the 
author, appeared in 1829. Yet the day of emancipation was 
not far off. The Reform Bill marked the birth of a generation 
completely out of sympathy with the historian's standpoint, 
while the appearance of two new histories of Greece, at once more 
scholarly, more literary and more liberal, provided effective 
substitutes. 

While Mitford's volumes were enjoying a great though fleeting 
popularity, a work of far higher value was compiled by Clinton. 1 
In a fragment of autobiography he describes his youthful enjoy- 
ment of the classics, and adds that his curiosity to read the 
Greek historians was inflamed by Mitford. At the age of twenty- 
nine he began their systematic study, making a chronology for 
himself as he read. He gradually embraced the whole of anti- 
quity, revising and enlarging his notes till they appeared to him 
worthy of publication. The ' Fasti Hellenici, or the Civil and 
Literary Chronology of Greece to the Death of Augustus,' ap- 
peared in three volumes, the political events to the left, literature 
and philosophy to the right, the authorities being quoted at 
considerable length. The work is marred by an extraordinary 
credulity. ' We may acknowledge as real persons,' declares the 
author, ' all those whom there is no reason for rejecting. The 
presumption is in favour of the early tradition, if no argument 
can be brought to overthrow it.' The genealogies contained 
many real persons, and there is no reason to doubt the existence 
of Cadmus or Danaus, Hercules or Theseus. Greece was planted 
by the family of Japhet, according to Moses, ' which no rational 
mind will doubt.' In an appendix on Scripture Chronology 
he professes a faith in the Old Testament which even in those 
uncritical days was rare among scholars. ' In the annals of 
the Hebrew nation we have authentic narratives written by 

1 See Literary Remains, 1854, and Grote's essay on Grecian Legends and 
Early History in his Minor Works, 1873. 



3io HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, contemporaries who wrote under the guidance of inspiration.' 
XVI Thus he solemnly calculates the date of the Flood, and believes, 
that Methuselah and the Patriarchs lived for hundreds of years. 
The work improves as we reach historical times, and the later 
volumes are of the utmost importance, above all that part 
which threads the maze of kingdoms which arose from the 
ruins of Alexander's empire. The long appendices go far 
beyond chronology and offer dissertations on many of the 
persons, events and problems of Greek history. Clinton was 
neither an historian nor a critic ; but his collection of material 
has lightened the labours of greater men. 

In his attack on Mitford Macaulay expressed his longing for 
a real history of Greece, embracing not only its politics but its 
society, its art and its literature, in order that the modern world 
might become conscious of its debt. A few years later the first 
scholarly history of Greece was published by Thirlwall,i who at 
the age of eleven had the satisfaction of seeing a volume of his 
essays and poems in print. In the preface to the ' Primitiae ' 
his father sketches the youth of the future historian. He was 
taught Latin at three, and at four he read Greek fluently. The 
earliest essay in the book, composed at seven, is a marvel of 
precocious expression. After winning a fellowship at Trinity 
College he spent some years at the Chancery Bar ; but his studies 
continued, and he translated Schleiermacher's essay on Luke, 
with an Introduction on recent criticism. In 1827 he was 
ordained and returned to Trinity, where he joined Julius Hare 
in translating Niebuhr. The two friends founded a classical 
review of which only six numbers appeared. ' We have been 
trying to revive the taste of the English public for philology in 
the highest sense,' he wrote to Bunsen ; but the attempt was 
premature. He became classical lecturer and tutor at his old 
college ; but a pamphlet on the admission of dissenters to 
degrees, containing an attack on compulsory attendance at 
chapel, led to his resignation. He accepted a crown living in 
Yorkshire, and in 1840 was appointed Bishop of St. Davids. 
When invited to write a history of Greece for Lardner's Cyclo- 
paedia, he undertook the task. The first volume was published 
in 1835, the eighth in 1844. A revised and expanded edition 
appeared between 1845 and 1852. The author declared himself 
abundantly satisfied with its reception. His modest ambition 

1 See his Letters, 1881. For appreciations see Edinburgh Review, 
April, 1876 (by Plumptre), and J. W. Clark, Old Friends at Cambridge and 
Elsewhere, 1900. He often appears in Wemyss Reid's Life of Lord 
Houghton, 1890. 



THIRLWALL, GROTE AND ARNOLD 311 

was ' to leave the history of Greece in some respects in better CHAP, 
condition than he found it.' Reserved in the expression of XVI 
opinion and lacking colour and enthusiasm, Thirlwall possessed 
none of the arts of popularity ; but his faultless scholarship and 
his balanced judgment made him the companion of the student 
who was determined to understand Greek history and was 
willing to take some trouble to reach his goal. 

The work opens with a sketch of the geography of the Greek 
world, a discussion of the early races and a picture of the culture 
of the heroic age. Unlike Mitford and Clinton, who believed 
in the reality of the Homeric personages, the disciple of Niebuhr 
carefully distinguishes legend from history. His survey of the 
golden period of Athens is clear and business-like, but lacks 
charm. There is no thrill of enthusiasm in the narrative of 
Marathon, and the art and literature of the age of Pericles occupy 
but little space. The struggle at Syracuse loses something of 
its tragedy and Alcibiades much of his brilliance. Thirlwall 
has no heroes except Socrates. His chapter on the internal 
condition of Athens during and after the Peloponnesian war is 
a rigidly judicial summary. ' Fickle, passionate, often unjust, 
they were also capable of mercy and pity.' For the first time 
in any language the great struggle between Philip and Demos- 
thenes was fully and fairly described. His calm, untroubled 
vision, which at times has seemed a little inhuman, here stands 
him in good stead. Unlike Niebuhr and Droysen, Mitford and 
Grote, he understands both sides. Demosthenes appears to him 
' good and great ' — far greater than Phocion, who, though 
personally of high character, became the slave of the conqueror. 
Philip, though unscrupulous and intriguing, was not without 
generous instincts. Few historians have taken such a favour- 
able view of Alexander's aims and achievements. ' His ambition 
almost grew, in the collateral aims which ennobled and purified 
it, into one with the highest of which man is capable.' His 
conquests were highly beneficial to the vanquished. But the 
blessings of his work which were experienced in Asia were barely 
felt in Greece. ' In many important respects her condition 
changed for the worst.' The book closes with a brief survey of 
events till the destruction of Corinth made Greece a Roman 
province. 

The merits of Thirlwall' s work are conspicuous. His classi- 
cal scholarship was faultless, and he allows for the bias of his 
authorities. He was fully abreast of German scholarship. 
Mitford wrote before it was necessary to know German. Clinton 
lamented his ignorance of the language. Thirlwall was the first to 



312 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, incorporate the results of Bockh and Otfried Miiller, of Welcker 
XVI and Droysen, of Creuzer and Lobeck, and a host of other scholars 
who rescued Greek antiquity for the modern world. In closing 
his work he glances at the emancipation of Greece, ' opening a new 
era of philology which has added more to our knowledge of the 
old Greek world than was gained in the preceding three centuries.' 
His judgment was equal to his scholarship. His pupil; Lord 
Houghton, when asked to name the most remarkable man he 
had ever known, replied without hesitation, ' Thirlwall.' The 
faults of the book are negative, not positive. It is almost too 
impersonal. The actors are a little shadowy, and the drama has 
the air of having been acted long ago. It was for Grote to bring 
the Athenian democracy back to life and to rivet the gaze of the 
world on its aspirations and achievements. 

At the age of twenty-eight Grote 1 began the systematic study 
of Greek history, and in 1826 he announced the views he had 
formed in an article on Mitford. While admitting the faults of 
the Greek democracies; he submits that they must be fairly 
judged. ' Compare them with any other form of government 
in ancient times and we have no hesitation in pronouncing them 
unquestionably superior. That the securities they provided for 
good government were lamentably deficient we fully admit ; 
but the oligarchies and the monarchies afforded no security at 
all.' He grapples with Mitford's contentions that the assemblies 
were fickle, the democracies unstable, the rich overtaxed, and 
castigates his gross blunders in scholarship. ' It is obvious/ he 
concludes, ' that an historian who can thus deviate from his 
authorities in recounting specific facts is still less to be relied on 
for accuracy in any general views. Should Greek history ever 
be written with care and fidelity, we venture to predict that his 
reputation will be prodigiously lowered.' He had already made 
the acquaintance of Bentham and the elder Mill, and was regarded 
as a promising recruit of the small but influential group of philo- 
sophic radicals. When the Whigs returned to power in 1830 
after their long eclipse he determined to enter Parliament, and 
from 1833 to 1 841 represented the City of London. With 
Roebuck and Molesworth he endeavoured to lead Grey and 
Melbourne further along the road of democracy than they cared 
to go. It was an experience of extraordinary interest and value, 

1 See Mrs. Grote, The Personal Life of George Grote, 1873, and Bain's 
admirable introduction to Grote's Minor Works, 1873. For expert 
appreciations of his work see Pohlmann, Aus Alterthum u. Gegenwart, 1895 ; 
Lehrs, Populdre Aufsdtze, 1875 ; Gomperz, Essays u. Erinnerungen, 1905 ; 
Freeman, Historical Essays, Second Series, Essays 4 and 5, 1873. 



THIRLWALL, GROTE AND ARNOLD 313 

but he had no wish to prolong it ; and when the Whigs fell in CHAP. 
1 841 he withdrew from the political arena. Two years later he XVI 
retired from the Bank, and devoted himself to the composition of 
his 'History of Greece,' of which the first volume appeared in 
1846 and the twelfth in 1856. No historian has approached his 
task with ampler preparation or greater sympathy. Though not 
strong in minute grammatical points, his scholarship was sound 
and adequate. He was able to take advantage of ' the inestimable 
aid of German erudition.' He had carefully studied the early 
history of other civilisations. He was a trained metaphysician, 
to whom the subtleties of Greek speculation presented no diffi- 
culties. His detachment from dogma allowed him to survey 
ancient civilisation without religious prepossessions. He was a 
convinced believer in democracy and ardently sympathised with 
the attempts made by the Greek States to realise it. Finally 
his experience of political life helped him to feel and make his 
readers feel the reality of the problems which the statesmen and 
thinkers of Greece attempted to solve. 

The work begins with a survey of the traditions of early 
Greece, his view of which he had explained in an article on 
Greek Legends and Early History. No one but Clinton believed 
them as they stood, and no attempt to rationalise them could 
winnow the wheat from the chaff. They were simply the creation 
of the fancy of an imaginative people. This attitude governs 
the first two volumes of the History. ' I know nothing so 
disheartening and unrequited as the elaborate balancing of 
what is called evidence concerning these shadowy times and 
persons. If the reader blame me for not assisting him, if he 
ask me why I do not withdraw the curtain and disclose the 
picture, I reply, in the words of the painter Zeuxis, that the 
curtain is the picture.' An historian who held such views would 
not have devoted so much space to the legends had he not found 
them of interest as a revelation of the budding mind of man. 
As scientific views of the universe gradually appeared, myths 
came to be treated as allegories. He shows wide knowledge of 
the sagas and legends of the world, and utilises the researches 
of the Grimms into Teutonic mythology as well as the results 
of Creuzer and Otfried Midler, Voss and Lobeck. To Clinton's 
argument that we must acknowledge as real persons all those 
whom there is no reason for rejecting, he replies that we must 
reject all those in whom there is no reason to believe. To the 
contention that the presumption is in favour of tradition, he 
rejoins that we are only dealing with poets' tales. The discussion 
of prehistoric Greece concludes with an analysis of the Homeric 



3 i4 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, poems. Steering a middle course between the Homeric author- 
XVI ship and the ballad theory of Wolf and Lachmann, he pronounces 
the Odyssey as in all probability the work of a single brain. The 
Iliad, on the other hand, was originally an epic on Achilles, on 
which other and minor episodes were grafted. Composed in the 
ninth century they were handed down by memory for about 
200 years, and assumed the form in which we know them under 
Pisistratus. Grote's conclusions are set forth tentatively, and 
if not generally accepted they have at least commanded respect. 
' Historical Greece ' opens with a brief geographical sketch. 
The narrative begins with the Spartan polity, and we reach firm 
ground with Solon, the first of the historian's heroes. At this 
point, when Greece begins to play a part in history, he surveys 
the world in chapters on Asia Minor, the Phoenicians, the Assyr- 
ians and the Egyptians. Having thus drawn a political map, 
he sketches the foundation of Greek colonies in the Mediterranean. 
The kernel of the book is the story of the Athenian democracy, 
which begins with the reforms of Cleisthenes. A rapid improve- 
ment, he declares, was wrought in the people. ' The active cause 
was the grand and new idea of the sovereign people, composed 
of free and equal citizens. It was this which acted with electric 
effect, creating a host of sentiments, motives, capacities to which 
they had before been strangers.' This exaltation lasted till about 
fifty years before the battle of Chseronea, when the Athenians 
fell to the level of other Greeks. ' Because democracy happens 
to be unpalatable to most modern readers, they have been 
accustomed to look on the sentiment only in its least honourable 
manifestations, such as the caricatures of Aristophanes. We must 
listen to it as it comes from the lips of Pericles.' The Persian wars 
showed that the Athenians could act as well as talk ; but they 
were on their guard against victorious generals. Grote laments 
the fall of Miltiades after Marathon, but argues that he deserved 
his disgrace. Fickleness was not an attribute of the Athenian 
character, for they were constant to Nicias and Phocion. They 
were faithful to their leaders so long as the leaders were faithful 
to Athens. After the Persian wars the Constitution reached 
its final form. Cleisthenes had swept away the distinctions 
founded on birth and diminished those founded on property. The 
remaining disabilities now disappeared. Athens was governed 
by a sovereign assembly of which every citizen was a member 
and from which all the officers of State were chosen. This 
government first substituted law for force, and was one of the 
best the world has ever seen. Its ideal character, if not its actual 
working, is enshrined in the immortal oration of Pericles. It 



THIRLWALL, GROTE AND ARNOLD 315 

was the golden age of rational liberty. ' No modern State CHAP, 
presents anything like the generous tolerance we read of here.' -^VI 
But it depended largely on Pericles himself, and when he was 
gone the decline began. ' His incorruptible public morality, his 
caution and firmness in a country where all these qualities were 
rare and their union still rarer, were without a parallel in Greek 
history.' 

Grote is by no means blind to the faults of the Athenians. 
He censures the cruelties which disgraced their wars, and con- 
demns the execution of the generals after Arginusse as a breach of 
the law, though he believes them guilty. In praising Nicias for his 
incorruptibility, he adds that it was a quality rare in Greek public 
men. He sharply condemns the Sicilian expedition. On the 
other hand he contends that they have been unjustly condemned 
on more than one ground. He explains and defends ostracism 
as a mild substitute for impeachment and executions. He 
champions Cleon against the satire of Aristophanes and the 
malice of Thuc3 r dides. The chapters on the Sophists and 
Socrates are among the most original in the book. Like the 
Scribes and Pharisees, the Sophists are known from the descrip- 
tions of their enemies. ' I know few characters in history who 
have been so hardly dealt with. They bear the penalty of their 
name.' Their task was to teach young men to think, speak 
and act, to prepare them for the duties and responsibilities 
of citizenship. They were moralists, not philosophers, a pro- 
fession, not a sect. There is no shred of evidence that their 
influence was bad, or that the time of their popularity was an era 
of degeneration. Grote stigmatises as a legend the decline of 
Athenian character. ' It is my belief that the people had become 
both morally and politically better, and that their democracy 
had worked to their improvement.' Socrates was himself a 
Sophist, or public teacher, differing from the rest in the publi- 
city of his teaching, his refusal of fees and his missionary en- 
thusiasm. That he was a good man does not prove that they 
were bad men or that his teaching was more useful than theirs. 
His contemporaries did not see him, as we do, through the golden 
mist of Plato's eloquence. Religious innovators have never 
been tenderly treated, either in pagan or Christian times, and 
only Athens would have tolerated Socrates so long. 

In the fourth century Athens is no longer the chief actor 
in the drama ; but the lamp of Greek civilisation still burned as 
brightly as ever. Grote 's admiration for Epaminondas is bound- 
less. A greater soldier though a lesser statesman than Pericles, 
the famous Theban alone reaches his stature. Agesilaus receives 



316 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, his due, and the historian lingers over the career of Timoleon, 
XVI the Washington of antiquity. Athens herself had no lack of 
noble citizens ; but they were powerless to avert her doom. 
That she was vanquished by brute force is no reason why we 
should bow the knee to her conqueror. He admits that her fall 
was in some measure due to herself. ' The Athenian of B.C. 360 
had, as it were, grown old. He had become a quiet, home- 
keeping, refined citizen.' At such a time the influence of Phocion 
proved fatal. But for him Athens might have repulsed Philip 
before he became irresistible. Though he deplores his policy, 
Grote recognises his personal excellence ; but in Demosthenes 
he salutes the union of virtue and wisdom. As Pericles incar- 
nates the spirit of Athens in her glory, Demosthenes is the 
principal ornament of the declining Hellenic world. The neglect 
of his advice brought Greek democracy to a violent end on the 
battlefield of Chaeronea. 

The picture of Philip is hostile without being radically 
unjust. He was a good general, though he was lucky in having 
no competent Greek commander against him. He was not 
without culture ; but he lacked moderation, held the oriental 
view of woman and disgraced himself by drunkenness. His son 
was far worse. The prince whom Droysen had glorified and 
Thirlwall had praised appears to Grote, as to Niebuhr, a bar- 
barian of genius, powerful only to destroy. He inherited his 
ungovernable impulses from his savage Epirot mother. The 
razing of Thebes was a cruelty unprecedented even in a cruel 
age. The murders of Philotas and Parmenio displayed his ruth- 
lessness, and that of Cleitus his unbridled passions. Fighting 
and conquering were both the business and luxury of his life. 
His raid into Asia was like Attila's attack on Europe. On the 
death of Darius he assumed the pomp and adopted the habits 
of a Persian King. ' Instead of hellenising Asia he was tending 
to asiatise Macedonia and Hellas.' His ' cities ' were only 
fortified posts to hold the country in subjection. Of all his 
foundations Alexandria alone flourished. While Greece had 
stood for liberty, Hellenistic Asia was incurably despotic. The 
only definite advantages of the Macedonian conquests were the 
improvement of communications, the growth of commerce and 
the increased knowledge of geography. If the conqueror had 
lived he would probably have subjugated the habitable world, 
including Rome. But he and his father had done enough mis- 
chief. ' After Alexander the political action of Greece becomes 
cramped and degraded, no longer interesting to the reader or 
operative on the destinies of the world.' Demosthenes took 



THIRLWALL, GROTE AND ARNOLD 317 

poison to escape death at the hands of the Macedonians. The CHAP. 
Achaean League, ' a sprout from the ruined tree of Greek liberty,' XV I 
never attained more than a puny life. Of all that had made 
Greece great only the schools of philosophy survived. 

The work was received with a chorus of admiration. His 
old schoolfellow Thirlwall had once remarked, ' Grote is the 
man to write a history of Greece.' After reading the first volume 
he wrote that high as were his expectations, they were very much 
surpassed. ' It affords an earnest of something which has never 
been done for the subject in our own or any other literature. It 
has afforded me some gratification that his views do not seem 
greatly to diverge from mine on more than a few important 
points.' After the first four volumes he confessed ' the great 
inferiority ' of his own performance. ' I may well be satisfied 
with that measure of temporary success and usefulness which 
has attended it, and can unfeignedly rejoice that it will, for all 
the highest purposes, be superseded.' The admiration was 
mutual, for Grote declared that if Thirlwall's book had appeared 
a few years sooner, he would probably never have written. The 
' History of Greece ' is one of the great historical books of the 
world. It owes little of its success to the style, which lacks 
colour and grace ; but few works make such an impression of 
intellectual power. He confesses that it was conceived when 
Greece was known through Mitford, and that its object was to 
correct his mistakes and to provide a juster view of the Greek 
world. For him the Greeks were ' the people by whom the first 
spark was set to the dormant intellectual capacities of our 
nature,' and his volumes are a long tribute of gratitude and 
admiration. No writer of any nation has done so much to make 
the world realise the importance of Greece for the statesman 
and the citizen. Well might Freeman declare that the reading 
of Grote was an epoch in a man's life. While others had cele- 
brated the mother of philosophy and science, literature and art, 
he regretted that literary glory had overshadowed her political 
greatness. Her highest achievement, her most precious contri- 
bution to humanity, was political liberty. Thus Greek history, 
and above all Athenian history, appeared in a new light. ' He 
is the first statesman,' wrote Lehrs, ' who has given us a picture 
of Greece.' There was hardly a fact of importance, declared 
Mill, which was perfectly understood before he re-examined it. 

Half a century of research and discussion, the revelation of 
Mycenaean civilisation, the discovery of the ' Politeia,' the study 
of aspects of Greek life which Grote neglected, have naturally 
overthrown or modified many of his conclusions ; but whatever 



318 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, else is read, parts of Grote must be read also. His preface shows 
XVI that he was aware of one of the pitfalls of the historian. ' We 
have to judge of the whole Hellenic world, eminently multiform 
as it was, from a few compositions, bearing too exclusively the 
stamp of Athens.' Despite this caution his book is rather 
Athenian than Hellenic. The earlier and later history suffers in 
consequence, and some of the minor states receive less than their 
due. His hatred of usurpers blinded him to the fact that the rule 
of the Tyrants was not the result of mere personal ambition but 
met a certain need. He overlooked some of the weaknesses of the 
Athenian State. ' Grote,' wrote Schomann, 1 ' has refuted not 
a few charges which have been brought against the Athenian 
Demos, reduced others to smaller proportions, and explained and 
extenuated what could not be praised. But though we gladly 
agree in all the good he says of the Athenians, it cannot modify 
our judgment of their democracy. Even the Athenian people 
soon experienced its mischievous effects.' But his partisanship 
is of the least harmful type. ' His work,' pronounces Freeman, 
' is even more honourable to his moral than to his intellectual 
qualities, for he gives facts which tell against his own conclusions. 
We read what he says, not as the sentence of a judge but as the 
pleading of an advocate ; yet it is a great thing to have the plead- 
ing of such an advocate.' Another obvious weakness is the 
neglect of economic influences. He does not see the gradual 
development of a gulf between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. 
By terminating his narrative in the fourth century he evades 
consideration of the results of the system which he has eulogised ; 
but they were already becoming obvious. Finally the conception 
of the work of Alexander is radically false. It was a grave 
error to regard him as a barbarian, as alien to Greece as Xerxes 
or Darius. The Macedonian dynasty was closely allied to Greek 
stock, the Macedonian Court was saturated with Greek in- 
fluences, and Alexander was himself a pupil of Aristotle and an 
enthusiastic student of Greek literature. Greek civilisation 
reached the modern world through the conquests of Alexander 
not less than through Rome. Merivale remarked satirically 
that he had interrupted his story just where it began to be 
interesting, and Freeman wrote a history of the federations which 
showed how the political instinct of the Greeks adapted itself 
to the changed surroundings. But these problems made no 
appeal to the veteran historian, whose closing years were devoted 
to Plato and Aristotle. 

1 Athenian Constitutional History as represented in Grote, Eng. trans, 
by B. Bosanquet, 1878, 



THIRLWALL, GROTE AND ARNOLD 319 



II 

The critical study of Roman history in England was inaugu- 
rated by the translation of Niebuhr ; but next to Hare and Thirl- 
wall his fame owes most to Thomas Arnold. 1 No English scholar 
hailed the revised volumes with greater delight, and no one 
entertained a deeper veneration for the author, whom he visited 
at Bonn. ' It is a work,' he wrote, ' of such extraordinary 
ability and learning that it opened wide before my eyes the extent 
of my own ignorance.' He planned a history of Rome, not to 
rival the production of so great a man but because it was not 
likely to become popular in England. When Niebuhr died, he 
was more desirous than ever to restate and continue his work 
to the coronation of Charles the Great. His ambition was to 
imitate his method of inquiry, ' to practise his master art of 
doubting rightly and believing rightly.' He approached his 
task with becoming modesty. ' As to any man being a fit 
continuator of Niebuhr,' he wrote to Hare, ' that is absurd ; 
but I have at least the qualification of an unbounded veneration 
for what he has done, and I should like to try to embody the 
thoughts and notions I have learnt from him.' The first volume 
of the ' History of Rome ' appeared in 1838, and covered the 
period before the invasion of the Gauls. The legends are related 
in archaic style to suggest that they are only romances. In the 
story of the Kings he finds a little, but only a little, that is histori- 
cal. In this part of his work it is the pen of Arnold and the voice 
of Niebuhr. Even the hypothesis of the ballads is accepted. The 
second volume reaches the end of the First Punic War. The 
third, bringing the narrative within sight of the end of the Second 
Punic War, was almost completed when the author died in 1841. 
Thus Arnold's book, like that of his master, remained a fragment. 

His early death decreed that his History should be remembered 
mainly as an adaptation of Niebuhr. Had he lived longer he 
would have shown how capable he was of walking alone. He was 
far better fitted to portray the life of a State than to reconstruct 
the faint outlines of an early civilisation. His strength grows 
as he advances, and his third volume is as superior to the second 
as the second to the first. ' The most remarkable of his talents,' 
wrote his friend Hare, ' was his singular geographical eye, which 
enabled him to find as much pleasure in looking at a map as 
lovers of painting in a Raphael.' This gift, added to his interest 

1 See Stanley's classical biography, Life and Correspondence of Thomas 
Arnold, 1844. 



CHAP. 
XVI 



320 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, in military affairs, enabled him to interpret Hannibal. His 
XV I admirable style, easy and flowing yet full of colour, found in the 
Second Punic War a theme worthy of itself. It is a grievous 
loss to literature that the hand which traced the portrait of the 
great Carthaginian was not spared to recount the fortunes of the 
Gracchi and the closing years of the Republic. The later part 
of his early sketch of Roman history was reprinted as a continua- 
tion ; but it is a very poor substitute for the unwritten volumes, 
and is chiefly of interest for the outspoken condemnation of 
Caesar. ' In moral character the whole range of history can 
hardly furnish a picture of greater deformity. Never did any 
man occasion so large an amount of human misery with so little 
provocation.' The portrait of Augustus is scarcely less severe, 
and the work forms a passionate indictment of Caesarism. The 
fundamental principle of Arnold's conception of history was that 
it was a divine process, and that man was a moral being account- 
able for his actions. He scornfully rejects the plea that the 
laws of morality which govern private relations are inapplicable to 
the action of rulers. The greater the sinner, the greater the sin. 
The end never justifies the means. The moral test is never 
absent in the volumes on Rome, and it appears with added 
emphasis in the course delivered as Regius Professor of History 
at Oxford in 1841. In these once famous lectures we meet 
rather the theologian than the historian. History is the setting 
forth of God's glory by doing His appointed work. ' We are 
living in the latest period of the world's history. W T e are the 
last reserve of the world- — its fate is in our hands. God's work 
on earth will be left undone unless we do it.' The Niebuhrian 
era lasted for a generation. But in 1855 there appeared a work 
which denounced the method of divination and rejected the 
reconstruction of early Roman history. The scepticism of 
Cornewall Lewis exceeded all bounds ; but it none the less 
revealed the unsubstantial character of Niebuhr's foundations. 
A year or two later his reign was brought to an end by the appear- 
ance of a rival, and Mommsen ruled in his stead. 

While the Republic was eagerly studied in the pages of 
Niebuhr and Arnold, Imperial Rome was almost totally neglected 
except by Clinton till the middle of the century. In 1840 
Merivale 1 undertook a short book on the Empire for the Society 
for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge ; but the Society failed 
before his task was accomplished. A visit to the Eternal City 
in 1845 increased his interest, and in 1850 the ' History of the 
Romans under the Empire ' began to appear. The preface calls 
1 See Autobiography and Letters, 1898. 



THIRLWALL, GROTE AND ARNOLD 321 

attention to ' the remarkable deficiency of our recent literature CHAP, 
in any complete narrative of the most interesting period of Roman XVI 
annals.' He wrote, he added, because Arnold had not written. 
But though he describes himself as Arnold's • admirer and friend,' 
his standpoint is fundamentally different. The first two volumes 
extend from the first triumvirate to the death of Caesar, whose 
career is described as the prelude to the history of four centuries. 
' The Imperium of his successors rose majestic and secure from 
the lines drawn by the most sagacious statesman of the Common- 
wealth.' In the preface to a later edition, he declares that he 
should have begun with the Gracchi. ' This would have shown 
the necessity for an entire reconstruction of society on a 
monarchical basis. The Roman oligarchy was the most wasting 
tyranny the civilised world has ever witnessed. Mankind 
groaned in misery and degradation that a hundred families 
might have the privilege of slandering and slaying one another. 
It deserved to perish, and its destroyers were benefactors to 
their species.' Merivale was a consistent admirer of strong 
governments, and when Louis Napoleon made his coup d'etat 
in 1 85 1 he remarked that he would have done the same. He 
admits Cassar's vicious private life ; but his public work was 
beneficent. The two following volumes are devoted to Augustus, 
' a man of genius.' He refuses to regard the early Empire as a 
despotism. There were bad Emperors ; but as a whole they 
were kept within bounds by the Senate, and their joint rule 
brought peace and happiness to the Roman world. ' There has 
been no government in human history in which law and usage 
have been so carefully observed by the ruling power as that 
of the Empire from Augustus to Pertinax.' Though he deals 
leniently with the Emperors, he does not attempt to whitewash 
Tiberius, nor does he idealise Roman society. He admits a 
growing tendency to despotism, though he suggests that the 
Romans bore it easily because they were themselves despots. 
After the fall of the Julian dynasty the narrative moves 
more swiftly. The work ends with Marcus Aurelius, partly 
to avoid competition with Gibbon, partly because the con- 
stitutional period of the Roman monarchy then terminated. 

Merivale's work was written at a time when it had no com- 
petitors, and was a real contribution to historical knowledge. 
The scholarship was sound, the narrative clear and vigorous. 
He is a convinced and enthusiastic advocate of the Empire. He 
exposed the unfairness of Tacitus, Suetonius and Dion, and 
reminded his readers that they wrote long after the events they 
described. He rescued Claudius from undeserved contempt, and 



322 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, claimed for the Flavian period the admiration which Gibbon 
XVI reserved for the Antonines. Domitian himself began as a 
reformer. If Arnold was tempted to judge rulers by too high 
a standard, Merivale asked too little of human nature. He was 
so much impressed by the outward success of the Empire that 
he paid little heed to its inner rottenness. He made Caesar and 
Augustus the chiefs of a popular party who erected their rule on 
the ruins of a corrupt oligarchy, instead of a pseudo-democratic 
despotism like that of the Bonapartes. The book has lost its 
authority, not because it has been superseded by a later work on 
the same subject, but because it was based on literary sources 
alone. While it was being written Mommsen and his assistants 
were already laying the foundation of a deeper knowledge of the 
Empire in the ' Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum.' 



CHAPTER XVII 

CARLYLE AND FROUDE 



During the first half of the nineteenth century no one, with the CHAP, 
exception of Macaulay, gave such an impetus to historical study * XVII 
as Carlyle. 1 While the English Whig employed history to justify 
his political convictions, the Scottish Calvinist used it to illus- 
trate and reinforce his ethical teaching. He devoted his early 
years to the study and interpretation of German literature ; 
and it was not till he reached the threshold of middle age that 
he began to prepare for wider flights. His essay ' On History,' 
published in 1830, reveals his first thoughts. Pronouncing it 
to be the essence of innumerable biographies, he emphasises the 
contribution of the humble to the making of civilisation. ' Which 
was the greatest benefactor, he who gained the battles of Canna? 
and Trasimene or the nameless poor who first hammered out for 
himself an iron spade ? Battles and war-tumults pass away like 
tavern brawls. Laws themselves, political constitutions, are not 
our life, but only the house in which our life is led. Nay, they 
are but the bare walls of the house, all whose essential furniture 
is the work of a long-forgotten train of artists and artisans who 
from the first have been jointly teaching us how to think and 
how to act.' New and higher things are beginning to be expected 
of the historian. ' From of old it was too often observed that 
he dwelt with disproportionate fondness in senate-houses, in 
battle-fields, nay, even in kings' antechambers, forgetting that 
far away from such scenes the mighty tide of thought and action 

1 Froude's biography, Carlyle's Reminiscences and correspondence, and 
Mrs. Carlyle' s Correspondence provide abundant biographical matter. 
Brief biographies have been written by Richard Garnett, 1887, and Nichol, 
1892. Among the best appreciations are Morley, Miscellanies, vol. i. ; 
Moncure Conway, Carlyle, 1881 ; Masson, Carlyle, 1885 ; Leslie Stephen, 
Hours in a Library, vol. iii. The essay in J. M. Robertson's Modern 
Humanists, 1895, is a powerful polemic. 

Y 2 



324 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, was still rolling on its course, that in its thousand, remote valleys 
XVII a whole world of existence was blooming and fading whether the 
famous victory was won or lost.' A criticism of Scott's ' History ' 
in his journal about the same time reveals similar convictions. 
' Strange that a man should think he was writing the history of 
a nation while he is chronicling the amours of a wanton young 
woman and a sulky booby blown up with gunpowder.' Two 
years later, in an essay entitled 'Biography,' he inquired whether 
the whole purpose of history was not biographic ; and in a second 
pronouncement, ' On History Again,' he lays increased stress on 
its moral value. ' History is not only the fittest study but the 
only study, and includes all others. It is the true epic poem 
and the universal divine Scripture.' But when he began to 
practise his trade it became the biography of great men rather 
than the record of the unnumbered and the unnamed ; and the 
narratives to which he devoted his middle and later life assumed 
precisely the character against which he had raised a warning 
finger in 1830. 

By the time that Carlyle had reached the affirmations of 
' Sartor ' he was out of touch with the eighteenth century ; but 
it was to that century that his interest unceasingly turned. His 
substantial studies of Voltaire and Diderot convey his estimate 
of the Philosophes, his essays on Cagliostro and the Diamond 
Necklace flash light into the dark corners of the Ancien Regime, 
while the portrait of Mirabeau crosses the threshold of the new 
age. This striking group of articles was his first contribution 
to history, and forms an introduction to his masterpiece. The 
' French Revolution,' l published in 1837, won him a national 

^reputation, and it is the only English historical work of the 
earlier half of the century, except Macaulay's ' Essays,' which is 
still universally read. Its merits are unique. In the first place, it 

"Is a piece of great literature. In a generation accustomed to the 
dissertations of Hallam and Alison and to the metallic brilliancy 
of Macaulay, a book brimful of passion and poetry came as a 
^revelation. By a supreme achievement of creative imagination 
he succeeded in rendering the vision as real to his readers as to 
himself. ' It stands pretty fair in my head,' he had written, 
' nor do I mean to investigate much more about it, but to splash 
down what I know in large masses of colour that it may look 
like a smoke and flame conflagration in the distance.' It is the 
most dramatic work in historical literature, the most epic of 
historical narratives. To the author it was far more than a 

1 See the editions of Fletcher and Rose, with introduction and noles, 
1902. Cp. the appendix on Carlyle's errors in Alger's Paris, 1789-94, 1902. 



CARLYLE AND FROUDE 325 

mere history of events, for it embodied his deepest moral and CHAP. 

religious convictions. We hear the impassioned accents of a XVII 

prophet calling sinners to repentance. On finishing his task he 

said to his wife, ' I know not whether this book is worth anything, 

nor what the world will do with it ; but there has been nothing 

for a hundred years that comes more direct and flamingly from 

the heart of a living man.' To John Sterling he wrote that it 

was a wild, savage book. ' It has come hot out of my own soul, 

born in blackness, whirlwind and sorrow.' The reader has its 

great scenes stamped ineffaceably on his mind. The storming 

of the Bastille, the raid on Versailles, the fete of the federation, 

the flight to Varennes, the trial and death of the King, Danton 

and the Girondins, the brief tragedy of Charlotte Corday, the 

fall of Robespierre — these pageants we carry with us through ^^ 

life. No writer but Michelet has approached Carlyle in the power 

of rendering the atmosphere of horror and hope, of tense passion 

and animal fury. No less remarkable is the insight into the " 

character of the leading actors. Lowell remarked that while 

the figures of most historians were like dolls stuffed with bran, 

Carlyle 's were so real that if you pricked them they bled. Though 

misconceiving the Girondins like other historians of his age, he 

drew portraits of the King and Queen, Mirabeau and Lafayette, 

Danton, Robespierre and Marat, which require little alteration. 

He had not yet capitulated to the exacting hero-worship which 

disfigures his later books. Sympathising little either with the 

old order or the new, he looks beyond the war-cries of party to 

the convulsive struggles of the human soul. If a doctrine is to 

be preached and a moral to be drawn it is from the drama as 

a whole, not from the fortunes of a single actor. 

Carlyle discovered the French Revolution for the English- 
speaking world; and painted a picture the colours of which are 
still undimmed ; but his book suffers from grave faults, some 
arising from the circumstances of the time, others from his lack 
of philosophic insight. In the first place, his knowledge of the 
period was extremely limited. He gave up the attempt to 
explore the Croker pamphlets on learning that he could not 
consult them on their shelves. The study of the archives had I 
not begun, and it never occurred to him that he ought to begin ' 
it. His main authorities were the Moniteur, the ' Histoire 
Parlementaire ' of Buchez and Roux, the narratives of Lacretelle 
and Thiers, and a few volumes of memoirs. Building upon such 
slender foundations it was not surprising that a large number of 
errors crept into his pages. In an essay on ' Histories of the 
Revolution ' he had sharply attacked the accuracy of Thiers ; 



326 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, but his own accuracy was not beyond ^reproach. He accepted 
XVII legends such as the drinking of a glass of blood by Mile. Som- 
breuil, which dates from 1800 ; the sinking of the Vengeur, an 
invention of Barere • the prophecy of Cazotte, which was written 
after the events ; and the last supper of the Girondins, the creation 
of Nodier. Barbaroux appears as the platonic lover of Mme. 
Roland in place of Buzot. The gravest of his mistakes occur in 
the narrative of the flight to Varennes. By making the distance 
65 instead of 150 miles, and supplying the fugitives with a huge, 
clumsy vehicle, he changes a well-planned enterprise into a 
childish scheme which deserved to fail. In the next place, his 
book is less a history than a series of tableaux. The introductory 
chapters scarcely attempt to explain the catastrophe that follows, 
and the narrative ends abruptly with the whiff of grape-shot in 
1795. The relations of France with Europe are overlooked, and 
the provinces are forgotten. Scenes of minor importance, such 
as the mutiny at Nancy, are treated at length, while constitu- 
tional and economic problems are omitted. He wearied of his 
task before the end, and the later part is very scrappy. No 
reader would learn how the Revolution developed and why one 
stage passed into another. To exalt the drama is to condemn 
the history. 
■^ A third fault is more fundamental. Carlyle misunderstood 

) » the character of the event with which he had to deal. He 

conceived the whole nation as driven wild by misery and oppres- 
sion, and prepared from the beginning for a complete upheaval. 
He thus conceived the Revolution as purely destructive, ' a 
transcendant revolt against the devil and his works,' a huge 
bonfire of the rotten feudalism of old France. ' I should not have 
known what to make of this world at all,' he said to Froude, 
' if it had not been for the French Revolution.' This colossal 
misconception arose not only from the error of isolating it from 
the European movements of the eighteenth century. As 
Mazzini pointed out in an eloquent review of the work of his 
friend, he lacked the conception of Humanity. 1 ' He does not 
recognise in a people any collective life or collective aim. He 
recognises only individuals. For him, therefore, there is not 
and cannot be any intelligible chain of connection between cause 
and effect.' That the Revolution was the parent of the nine- 
teenth century, that beneath its tragic horrors lay the seeds of 
a more generous life, that constructive work of a permanent 
'character was accomplished, that it incorporated many ideas and 
..tendencies of the Ancien Regime — all this was unknown to him. 

1 Essays. 



CARLYLE AND FROUDE 327 

While Carlyle bids us witness the dusk of the gods, Michelet CHAP, 
salutes the birth-pangs of democracy. No one can begin to under- j XVII 
stand the Revolution till he realises its dual character. Tried 
by this test Carlyle fails. He is the greatest of showmen and 1 
the least of interpreters. He described his work as ' one of the' 
savagest written for several centuries, a book written by a 
wild man ' ; and it enjoyed a mixed reception. Wordsworth 
exclaimed that no Scotchman could write English. Hallam 
declared that he could not read it owing to its detestable style. 
' The whole thing,' wrote Prescott, ' both as to form and fonds, 
is perfectly contemptible.' It was wrong to colour so highly 
what nature had already over-coloured. But the chorus of 
praise was louder. Mill hailed it as one of those works of genius 
which are a law to themselves. Kingsley christened it the single 
epic of modern days. Critics of such different schools as Jeffrey 
and Arnold, Sterling and Thackeray, recognised its rare genius. 
Southey read it through six times. As a prose epic its position 
is unassailable ; but it was never revised, and its authority in 
the world of scholarship has long disappeared. _ 

As the ' French Revolution ' made its way but slowly, Harriet 
Martineau and other friends aided Carlyle to increase his resources 
by public lectures. Four courses were delivered, of which only 
the last and the best, on ' Heroes and Hero- Worship,' was pub- 
lished. The character studies of Mahomet, Dante, Shakespeare, 
Luther, Cromwell and Knox excited the enthusiasm of the audi- 
ence . Every lecture was a sermon. ' I had bishops and all kinds of 
people among my hearers,' he wrote to his mother. ' I gave them 
to know that the poor Arab had points about him which it were 
good for them all to imitate, and that probably they were more 
quacks than he.' The message of the book also compelled 
attention. He had learned to think meanly of the capacity 
and the virtue of the average man. ' The immense mass of 
men,' testifies Froude, ' he believed to be poor creatures, poor 
in heart and poor in intellect.' like the Calvinistic theologian 
he thought that the elect were few. Without the sheep-dog the 
flock would go astray. It is no longer the unnamed benefactors 
of the race to whom he offers homage, but the men of elemental 
energy who overturn crumbling institutions and carve out 
paths for their successors to follow. The hero steers his course 
by living facts, and to recognise the eternal verities is to serve 
God. From the thesis that the right cause wins it is only a step 
to the contention that the winning cause is the right one. Mon- 
cure Conway has charitably maintained that what Carlyle 
worshipped was not force but work, the turning of chaos into 



328 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, order. But he cared little about the methods by which it was 

XVII performed. In 1832 he declared himself ' a radical and an 

absolutist ' ; but the absolutist soon swallowed the radical. The 

crude doctrine of values which emerges in ' Heroes ' dominates 

and disfigures much of his later work. In ' Past and Present ' 

the conception of leadership wears its most engaging form in 

Abbot Samson ; but in the essay on Dr. Francia, the Dictator 

of Paraguay, it assumes its most repulsive aspect. The ' veraci- 

I ous ' man is he who entertains no scruples and tramples down 

J the obstacles which bar the way to power. It never occurred 

to him to investigate the effects of autocracy either on the 

ruler or the ruled. He forgot the golden truth expressed in Mill's 

dictum that where the schoolmaster does all the pupils' lessons 

they never advance. 

In ' Heroes ' Cromwell was described as ' a great and true 
man.' While reading Clarendon in 1822 Carlyle had planned a 
study of the Civil Wars, and wrote a number of character sketches, 
which appeared after his death. After the publication of the 
' French Revolution ' he resumed his studies of the Puritan era. 
He bitterly complained of ' the shoreless lakes of bilge-water ' 
through which he was compelled to wade. ' I get to see,' he 
wrote in his journal in 1840, ' that no history in the strict sense 
can be made of that unspeakable puddle of a time — a Golgotha 
of dead dogs. Yet I say to myself a great man does lie buried 
under this waste continent of cinders.' He visited the field of 
Naseby with Dr. Arnold, and stood in Ely cathedral on the spot 
where the historic order, ' Leave your fooling and come out, 
Sir,' was issued and obeyed. He finally determined to confine 
himself to a collection of Cromwell's letters and speeches, 1 and 
the scheme, thus narrowed, was rapidly carried out. The Pro- 
tector had never found a friend. To royalists he was the man of 
blood, to republicans the great apostate, to sceptics like Hume 
' a frantic enthusiast.' Macaulay admired without understanding 
him, and Forster had recently launched a biography which once 
more recorded the descent from the patriot to the tyrant. 

It was Carlyle's ambition to vindicate both the character and 
the policy of his hero. In the former his success was incontest- 
able. Cromwell was disinterred from the load of misrepresenta- 
tion and calumny which had weighed on hirn for nearly two 
centuries, and allowed to bear witness in his own defence. No 
candid reader of the ' Letters and Speeches ' can entertain a 
doubt as to his transparent sincerity and his patriotism. James 
Mozley and Church declared themselves wholly unconvinced ; 
1 See Professor Firth's introduction to Lomas' edition, 1904. 



CARLYLE AND FROUDE 329 

but they stood almost alone. 1 Forster confessed himself a CHAP, 
convert, and no rational being now believes the Protector to XVII 
have been either a hypocrite or a fanatic. It was the proudest 
achievement of the historian's life to restore to England one of 
the greatest of her sons. The interpretation of policy, on the 
other hand, is far less convincing. He first realised how large a 
part in the struggle was played by the religious factor ; but 
he failed to measure the strength of the demand for political 
self-government. Caring nothing for representative institutions, 
he never understood that they could be the object of passionate 
desire. Thus, instead of tracing the evolution of Cromwell's 
political ideas under the stress of events, he attributes to him 
his own unquestioning belief in autocracy. The Clarke Papers 
were to show how unwillingly he advanced towards supreme 
power, how earnestly he attempted to work with Parliament, 
how deep was his conviction of the frailty of a benevolent 
despotism. Carlyle never realised that even a good government 
maintained by the sword was not worth having. The time 
was out of joint and the hero was at hand to set it right. He 
pours scorn on Ludlow and Vane as Mommsen was to pour scorn 
on Cicero and Pompey. He believed that the history of the 
Commonwealth proved the incapacity of a popular assembly to 
govern. In reality it established the impossibility of Personal 
Government. 

Carlyle was totally unfitted for the technical duties of an 
editor. He accepted the Squire Papers — forged after the publi- 
cation of his book as a practical joke — without asking to see the 
originals and without observing that they were filled with modern 
phraseology. He made little effort to seek the best text, allowed 
himself a wide licence in emendations, and modernised the 
speeches. Such proceedings would ruin the reputation of a 
professional scholar ; but Carlyle cared little about an exact 
rendering of his materials so long as he could make his hero live. 
If, in the words of Green, the work is characterised by the learning 
of an antiquary and the genius of a poet, it is no less remarkable 
for the resourcefulness of a showman. No one can dispute that 
he aids the reader to visualise the man, and that he occasionally 
makes sense of unintelligible passages. When the critic has 
done his worst, the ' Cromwelliad ' remains a marvellous pro- 
duction. What may be called the illustrations to the text; 
such as the battle of Dunbar and the death of the hero, are 
masterpieces of literature. The ' Letters and Speeches ' remain 

1 See J. B. Mozley, Essays, vol. i., 1878 ; and Church, Occasional 
Papers, vol. i., 1897. 



330 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, a classic, fearing no rivalry, a monument to two great and not 
XVII wholly dissimilar souls. 

The long association with Cromwell strengthened Carlyle's 
conviction that men of action formed the backbone of history. 
His view of British politics became more and more gloomy. The 
progress of which his contemporaries spoke was progress back- 
wards. He believed neither in democracy nor science. The 
Reform Bill was a failure. Parliament was the weakness, not 
the strength of the State, an obstacle to work, not its instrument. 
As his belief in government by discussion waned, his admiration 
for benevolent autocrats waxed. The author of ' Latter Day 
Pamphlets ' could not but look back with longing to the eighteenth 
century, which, if an era of religious scepticism, was also the age 
of flesh-and-blood rulers. A visit to the battle-fields of Frederick 
the Great in 1852 marks the definite inauguration of his last 
and most formidable historical task. Old Fritz had not figured 
in the lectures on Heroes, and after years of study he remarked, 
' I never cared very much about him.' Yet he pronounced him 
the last of the Kings. If he had not the faith of Abbot Samson 
or Cromwell, he at any rate believed in facts and accepted the 
gospel of work. If he deceived others, he never deceived 
himself. 

When Carlyle published his volumes, the Great King was 
almost unknown in England. Macaulay's essay was thoroughly 
mediocre. Nor did he derive much help from his German guides, 
whom he dismissed as 'dark, chaotic dullards.' 1 Preuss had 
collected a vast quantity of material, and Ranke had sketched 
his policy and administration. No one had reproduced his 
personality. It was this task which he set himself to perform. 
The sketch of early history is needlessly detailed ; but the 
full-length portrait of Frederick William I is perhaps the most 
successful part of the entire work. The silent man of action, 
with his faith in God and his unresting labours for his people, 
speaks straight to the heart of the historian. The boorishness of 
the ruler and the horseplay of the Tobacco Parliament attracted 
rather than repelled the man who heartily despised the tinsel 
and flunkeyism of court life. Frederick appeals to his historian 
less than his uncouth father. Carlyle cared little more for 
verse-making and flute-playing than Frederick William ; but 
when the hero emerges as a man of action the historian offers 
his homage. While the justice of the claim on Silesia interests 

1 For the early biographers see Hintze, Historische u. Politische Aufsatze, 
vol. ii. For an authoritative German view of the book see Krauske, 
1 Macaulay and Carlyle,' Hist. Zeitschrift, vol. cii. 



CARLYLE AND FROUDE 331 

him little, he applauds the bold decision and the successful execu- CHAP, 
tion. He had displayed in the ' Cromwell ' his rare powers as a XV H 
military historian. A second visit to Germany in 1858 stamped 
every detail of the battle-fields on his tenacious memory ; and so 
exact were his descriptions of the campaigns that they served to 
instruct German officers till the General Staff compiled its own 
history. On the other hand, the ten fruitful years of reform 
and reconstruction between the two great struggles are merely 
outlined. When the Seven Years' War ended in 1763 the reign 
was only half over ; but the last twenty-three years are dismissed 
in half a volume mainly devoted to foreign policy. Of the 
unceasing labour to reform the finances, to develop the resources 
of the soil, to plant new industries, to humanise the law, we hear 
little or nothing. Henry Larkin, 1 who helped him with the work, 
testifies that Carlyle contemplated a fairly complete account of 
Frederick's reconstruction of his kingdom, which he regarded 
as the most important and instructive lesson of his career. But 
the book was already longer than he had anticipated, and his 
energies were spent. Moreover, he believed that no living picture 
could be built up from official reports and statistics. 

If the ' Frederick ' thus fails both as a biography and a 
history of the reign and adds little to knowledge, it is none the 
less full of purple patches. It has been called the largest and 
most varied show-box in historical literature. Mrs. Carlyle, 
an exacting critic, pronounced it the best of her husband's 
works. It exhibits an undiminished power of mise-en-scene, 
freshness of humour, and mastery of character-painting. Emer- 
son pronounced it the wittiest book ever written. Carlyle never 
composed anything more brilliant than the story of Voltaire's 
visit to Potsdam, and the portraits of the rulers of Europe are in 
his best style. Its immediate success was greater than that of 
the ' French Revolution ' or the ' Cromwell,' and it was at once 
translated into German. When he began his task few dreamed 
of the dramatic transformations to come. When he concluded, 
the first blows of Bismarck's hammer had fallen. The sensational 
rise of a new Power stimulated interest in the founder of Prussia's 
greatness, and Carfyle's services as an historian and a defender of 
the German cause in 1870 were rewarded by Frederick's own 
coveted Order ' Pour le Merite.' Yet the book is too long for its 
readers, as it was too long for its author. The hero was less 
heroic than he had supposed. Cromwell's task had been per- 
formed ever in the Taskmaster's eye ; but Frederick believed 
neither in God nor man. To Varnhagen he wrote that he had 

1 Carlyle, 1886. 



332 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, only labour and sorrow in the book, and added, ' What the devil 
XVI1 had I to do with your Frederick ? ' Yet Old Fritz was in some 
ways an even greater king than he imagined, and Koser's master- 
piece leaves an impression which the professional hero-worshipper 
fails to convey. 

Carlyle was the greatest of English historical portrait -painters. 
It was his habit, relates Gavan Duffy, 1 to paste on a screen 
engraved portraits of the people about whom he was writing. 
It kept the image of the man steadily in view, remarked the Sage, 
and one must have a clear image of him in the mind before it 
was possible to make the reader see him. But the writer who 
saw individuals with such incomparable clearness was weak in 
perspective and blind to the very existence of the masses. His 
later years reveal something like contempt for the poor and 
the ignorant. ' Shooting Niagara ' gave almost brutal expression 
to his opinion of the working-classes in 1867. He told Wolseley, 
half in earnest, that he hoped he would lock the door of Parlia- 
ment and turn the members out. ' He sided with the South in the 
slavery struggle, and with Governor Eyre against quashee nigger. 
His whole philosophy was that the common herd must be drilled, 
led and punished by their superiors. Alike in politics and history 
he drifted ever further away from the generous intuitions of 
his early manhood. 



II 

Carlyle 's chief disciple and biographer, approaching history 
in the spirit of his master, accomplished work in which shining 
merits and glaring faults were inextricably mingled. An eminent 
Belgian critic has christened Froude 3 the national historian. 
He points out that he is almost unknown on the Continent, and 
that none of his books have been translated. ' He is passion- 
ately, fanatically, exclusively English.' His studies began 
under the auspices of the Oxford Movement. When Newman 
commenced a series of Lives of the Saints, he turned to the 
brother of Hurrell to assist him, with the marching orders, 
' Rationalise when the evidence is weak, and that will give 
credibility when you can show the evidence is strong.' Froude 
chose St. Neot, a contemporary of Alfred, and wound up his nar- 

1 Conversations with Carlyle, 1892. 

2 See Herbert Paul's admirable Life of Froude, 1905 ; Sarolea, Essais, 
Premiere Serie, 1905 ; Skelton, The Table Talk of Shirley, 1895 ; Frederic 
Harrison, Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill, etc., 1899 ; Algernon Cecil, Six Oxford 
Thinkers, 1909. 



CARLYLE AND FROUDE 333 

rative with the words, ' This is all, and perhaps rather more than CHAP, 
all, that is known of his life.' His tour through the cloudy region XVII 
of hagiology made him half a sceptic ; and though he was ordained 
in 1845 his faith gradually disappeared. The public burning of 
the ' Nemesis of Faith ' in 1849 was the turning-point of his life. 
Deprived of his Fellowship, he left Oxford for London. It was 
at this dark moment that he met Carlyle, who helped him to 
build up a new faith. His historical and literary essays quickly 
became popular, and an article on Elizabethan Seamen inspired 
' Westward Ho ! ' 

No one could live through the Oxford Movement without 
thinking a good deal about the Reformation. Of all the disciples 
of Newman none had spoken with such fierce contempt of the 
Reformers as his brother Hurrell ; but on beginning to study 
the sixteenth century for himself Froude was struck by the 
popularity of Henry VIII during his lifetime. When the plan 
arose in his mind of a detailed narrative of the struggle of England 
against Rome, he was warmly encouraged by Carlyle, who had 
recently scourged the Jesuits in a Latter Day Pamphlet, and I 
regarded the Roman Church as a gigantic imposture. The first ! : 
four volumes of the ' History of England from 1529 to the death 
of Elizabeth ' created a sensation only less than that of Macaulay. 
The High-Church movement had made the Reformers widely 
unpopular, and Whigs like Hallam and Macaulay had attacked 
them for sycophancy. Froude 's defence of Henry and the 
Reformation rests on the broadest ground. Starting with the pro- 
found conviction that Rome was and always had been the enslaver 
of mind and soul, he entertained heartfelt gratitude to the 
agents by whom its sway over his countrymen was broken. He 
utterly rejected Hume's contention that the people were like 
Eastern slaves, and refused to believe that an English Parliament 
could have supported the King for any other reason than that 
it agreed with his policy. Seen in this light there could be no 
question of despotism. Engaged in a life-and-death struggle the 
King was bound to use every weapon of offence and defence, 
and the people applauded his action. The Reformation was by 
far the greatest event in our history. It was not a conflict 
between rival dogmas, but a struggle to decide whether England 
should govern herself or be ruled by priests. The breach with 
Rome was the beginning of the greatness of England, a blow 
struck for human freedom and intellectual honesty. Having 
no theology of his own, there is no attack on Catholic dogma in 
Froude's voluminous writings. That there were plenty of good 
men on the wrong side he readily admits ; but those who believe 



334 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, that the right side won should be grateful to the authors of their 
XVII emancipation. 

Froude was not content with showing that Henry's victory 
was the salvation of the race. He convinced himself that the 
King was a much better man than was commonly believed — 
more conscientious, less cruel, less selfish, less sensual. He 
contends that the divorce was the result of genuine scruples, 
that Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard were guilty of adultery, 
and that his subjects were no less anxious than he for legitimate 
male heirs. The marriage with Jane Seymour the day after the 
execution of Anne was ' an official act which his duty required 
at the moment.' He did not love her, but married her ' under 
the pressure of a sudden and tragic necessity.' The execution 
of More and Fisher is defended on the ground that they were 
prepared to bring over a foreign army and plunge the country 
into civil war. In these measures of swift decision the King 
was acting as the trustee of the national security. The dissolu- 
tion of the monasteries was necessary, not only because they were 
the garrison of Rome, but because their morals were an offence ; 
and the spoils went not only to the courtiers but to education 
and the national defences. 

The volumes on Henry VIII were beyond comparison the 
-jnost brilliant historical work produced in England in the middle 
of the century, with the single exception of Macaulay. The 
magnitude of the issues, the vivid portraiture of famous men, 
the chances and changes of mortal life, the dominating figure of 
the masterful King, arrested attention. A born story-teller, he 
produces his effects by the simplest methods. The reader 
voyages without effort over sparkling waters. No English 
historian has possessed a style so easy, so flowing, so transparent. 
Yet, despite its enthusiastic welcome by militant Protestants of 
the school of Kingsley, it aroused sharp criticism. The Edin- 
burgh Review delivered a sustained attack on the historian's 
conceptions of morality. 1 It was difficult to believe he had ever 
seen the face of English justice. His reading of Henry VIII 
was a pervading paradox. He innocently assumed that the 
Parliament of 1529 was freely elected, whereas it was virtually 
nominated by the sheriffs. He found nothing suspicious in the 
fact that no judge or jury acquitted a victim in a Crown pro- 
secution. He seized on the preambles to the Statutes as trust- 
worthy evidence of public opinion. The whole work was vitiated 
by the worship of force. ' Carlyle,' concludes the critic, 'has a 
good deal to answer for by his splendid and dangerous example 

1 July, 1858. 



CARLYLE AND FROUDE 335 

of spoiling what might have been so good a book.' Bergenroth CHAP, 
declared the writer to be no historian. Pauli and Ranke re- XVII 
jected Froude's reading of the reign. In his superb lectures on 
Henry VIII Stubbs professed himself quite unable to accept his 
view of the King ; and Friedmann's studies of Anne Boleyn showed 
that Parliament was a shadow. The volumes on Edward and 
Mary are less striking, owing to the lack of a dominating figure, 
but they are of higher historical value. The notion that Cranmer 
was a mere sycophant is dead, and Froude did more than any 
one to kill it. He was the first to show the greatness of Somerset, 
his generous ideals and his sympathy with the common people. 
Mary was conscientious enough, indeed too faithful an inter- 
preter of a hateful religion. The fires of Smithfield reminded 
England what Catholicism really meant, and completed her" 
conversion. Thus the reign, despite its unspeakable horrors, 
was a blessing in disguise. The lesson has never had to be 
repeated. 

The later and larger half of the work is devoted to Elizabeth. 
Artistically, despite many brilliant passages, it is inferior to the 
earlier volumes. Froude presents too much of his material to 
his readers. He was not, however, without some excuse, for the 
Elizabethan volumes rest to a large extent om the priceless 
archives of Simancas, which he was the first English historian 
to use. As his dislike of Henry had been turned to sympathy 
by detailed investigation, his early devotion to the Queen melted 
away into something like contempt. He rejects the scandals 
relating to her personal character ; but her career had never 
before been subjected to a microscopic examination, and it could 
not sustain the scrutiny. ' The letters of Burleigh and Walsing- 
ham,' he wrote, ' have finally destroyed the prejudice that still 
clung to me that, despite her many faults, she was a woman of 
ability. The great results of her reign were the fruits of a policy 
which did not belong to her and which she starved and 
thwarted.' To the pedestal from which Elizabeth is deposed her 
chief minister is exalted. ' Burleigh,' declares the historian in 
uncompromising terms, ' was the solitary author of Elizabeth's 
and England's greatness.' We owe to Froude our full know- 
ledge of the tireless efforts of the great statesman. Less a 
brilliant than a cautious mind, he required ample time for his 
operations. He was allowed forty years, and he used them to 
establish Protestantism on an impregnable foundation. The 
Scottish scenes of the drama are at once the most brilliant and 
the least trustworthy. Mary Stuart is pursued with relentless 
hatred through thirty years, while her half-brother, the Regent 



336 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. Murray, stands out as a stainless knight in the crowd of worthless 
XVII intriguers. The Casket Letters are accepted en bloc, and the 
stern Protestant moralist feels a righteous joy in unmasking 
the Catholic sinner. The real hero of the story is Knox, the man 
after his own heart, who saved the Reformation. The Irish 
chapters oppress the reader with their monotonous horror. The 
extracts from Simancas and the Burleigh papers were so consider- 
able that the historian laid down his pen after the Armada. It 
was a wise decision. Twelve stout volumes had been occupied 
with the story of sixty years. Moreover, the book was a drama 
of conflict, and it was artistically desirable that it should end 
on a note of victory. For practical purposes the struggle for 
national freedom which began in 1529 ended in 1588. The chess- 
player, in Froude's words, sweeps the pieces from the board 
when the end is in sight. 

The strength and weakness of the work are now generally 
recognised. It was the first and it remains the only detailed 
survey of one of the two most critical periods of our history. 
It restored the authors of the Reformation to life, and enriched 
English literature with innumerable pages of vivid and thrilling 
narrative. Freeman's attacks in the Saturday Review made a 
stir at the time, but contained little substance. ' I fancy,' he 
wrote to a friend, ' that from endlessly belabouring Froude I get 
credit for knowing more of these times than I do. But one can 
belabour Froude on a very small amount of knowledge. I am 
profoundly ignorant of the sixteenth century.' He was right 
in his censure of Froude's indifference to the cruelty of his heroes. 
He was justified in complaining of his neglect to investigate the 
relations of the Crown with Parliament and the Courts. He was 
within his rights in calling attention to careless proof-reading 
and mistakes of detail. But his final verdict, delivered in 1870 
on the conclusion of the work, exceeds the limits of fair criticism. 
' Mr. Froude is not an historian. His work consists of four 
volumes of ingenious paradox and eight of ecclesiastical pamphlet. 
The blemishes which cut it off from any title to the name of 
history are utter carelessness as to facts and utter incapacity to 
distinguish right from wrong.' In vain the defendant challenged 
the Saturday Review to let two competent experts verify the 
references in any hundred pages. In a letter to Skelton he wrote, 
' I acknowledge to five real mistakes in twelve volumes and about 
twenty trifling slips, equivalent to i's not dotted and t's not 
crossed ; and that is all that the utmost malignity has dis- 
covered.' A few years later, when he published some articles 
on Becket, his old opponent accused him of ' fanatical hatred 



CARLYLE AND FROUDE 337 

towards the English Church, reformed or unreformed,' and CHAP, 
charged him with ' an inborn and incurable twist which renders XVII 
it impossible for him to make an accurate statement on any 
matter.' To this first signed attack Froude returned a dignified 
reply, pointing out that his critic had only discovered two or 
three trifling misprints and mistakes. 

Freeman's violent attacks have injured his own fame more 
than that of his victim. While the historian of the Norman 
Conquest eschewed manuscripts, nine-tenths of Froude's materials 
were in the archives. In transcribing documents, often almost 
illegible and written in several languages, mistakes were inevit- 
able. He was an exceptionally careless copyist and corrector of 
proofs, and did not always trouble to distinguish between quota- 
tion in full and his own abridgments. But deliberate alteration 
of the meaning of his sources was impossible to him. In bis 
imaginative sketch, ' A Siding at a Railway Station,' he defends 
himself against the charge of falsification. Skelton, the bio- 
grapher of Maitland and Mary Stuart, declares that he had ' a 
passionate reverence for truth.' Though he could not accept 
all his conclusions, he bears emphatic testimony to the inexhaust- 
ible industry and substantial accuracy of his friend. Andrew 
Lang, who worked carefully over much of the same ground, 
pronounces that though no historian was more honest, few or"*** 
none of his merit had been so fallible. Brewer complained that 
in the narrative of Thomas Cromwell's early life scarcely a 
statement was correct. Wiesener has pointed out many mis- 
takes in the story of the youth of Elizabeth. In editing a revisecf 
edition of Carlyle's ' Reminiscences ' Charles Eliot Norton made 
130 corrections in the first five pages of Froude's edition, and he 
declared that almost every letter in the ' Life ' which he had 
collated was incorrectly printed. How treacherous was his 
memory was shown in his volumes of travel. 

Though his incredible carelessness in detail is a grave fault, ' 
it is still more lack of impartiality that excludes Froude from the ... 
first rank of historians. Professor Pollard has suggested that 
his conception of Henry VIII was less extravagant than his 
earlier critics maintained ; but his mind lacked serenity and 
insight into differing modes of thought. The main occupation 
of his life was to combat the Roman Church. On completing 
his defence of the Reformation he turned to a later chapter of 
the same struggle. Having boldly vindicated the cruelties of the 
Tudors, he undertook the even more unsavoury task of defending 
the English regime in Ireland. ' When Catholic and Protestant 
came into conflict,' confesses his sympathetic biographer, Mr. 



338 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. Herbert Paul, ' he took instinctively, almost involuntarily, the 
XVII Protestant side.' His bias is far more offensive in the later than 
in the earlier work. In the eighteenth century the Govern- 
ment did not possess the excuse that a deadly struggle was in 
progress. ' The English in Ireland ' breathes the very spirit 
of Carlyle. Though liking the Irish peasant and never happier 
than when fishing in Kerry, he shared his master's contempt for 
the race. ' I have grown to hate my Irish book,' he wrote to 
Skelton. ' It will make the poor Paddies hate me too, which I 
do not wish.' In a brutal aphorism which threatens the inde- 
pendence of every small State in the world, he declares that the 
right of a people to self-government can consist in nothing but 
their power to defend themselves. The Irish were an inferior 
breed, Catholicism a degrading idolatry. On reaching the 
critical years of the Grattan Parliament he takes his stand with 
the most fanatical Tories. While Grattan was led astray by 
the delirium of nationality, the true statesman was Clare. He 
condemns the concession of the franchise to Catholics in 1793, 
approves the recall of Fitzwilliam, censures the squeamishness of 
Cornwallis and Abercrombie, exalts the Orange Lodges and 
applauds the King's opposition to emancipation. There was 
some ground for the remark that in Froude's eyes it was no 
crime to kill a Catholic. The book was an Orange manifesto. 
Its purpose was to show the uselessness of conciliation. Froude 
was one of those whom Gladstone had in his mind when he 
referred to the belief that the Irish had a double dose of original 
sin. Though containing a good deal of valuable material, the 
work was morally indefensible and politically mischievous. 
Undeterred by Burke's warning, he brought an indictment 
against a nation. Carlyle was naturally delighted with a book 
that reflected his own prejudices ; but its authority was for ever 
extinguished by Lecky's serenely crushing reply. 

After composing an eloquent rhapsody on Caesar and com- 
piling the official biography of Carlyle, Froude returned in old 
age to the sixteenth century with a volume on Catherine of 
Aragon, which showed that he had learned nothing and forgotten 
nothing. He was frankly disappointed that his reading of 
Henry VIII had not been accepted, and bitterly declared that 
it was no good trying to alter popular verdicts. Yet he found 
nothing to withdraw and little to alter. He did not pretend to 
impartiality, for he believed in the Reformation. ' The legis- 
lation of Henry and his Parliaments is the Magna Charta of the 
modern world. The stake played for was the liberty of mankind. 
Those who believe that the victory was of right over wrong 



CARLYLE AND FROUDE 339 

have no need to blush for the actions of the brave men who CHAP, 
in the pulpit or the Council Chamber, on the scaffold or at the XVII 
stake, won for mankind the spiritual liberty which is now the 
law of the world.' The three courses of lectures delivered when 
he succeeded Freeman at Oxford, dealing with the Council of 
Trent, the seamen of the sixteenth century, and the Letters of 
Erasmus, breathe the same militant Protestantism. Froude 
closes the age of the amateurs, whose brilliant writings belong 
as much to literature as to history. In a revealing utterance he 
pronounced that the most perfect English history was to be found 
in Shakespeare's plays. His great scenes are equal to Macaulay, 
and Frederic Harrison has compared him to Livy and Froissart. 
But he was even less of a thinker than Carlyle, and his work has 
to be done over again. He never realised that the main duty of 
the historian is neither eulogy nor invective, but interpretation 
of the complex processes and conflicting ideals which have 
built up the chequered life of humanity. 



z-i 



CHAPTER XVIII 



THE OXFORD SCHOOL 



CHAP. While the writings of Macaulay, Carlyle and Froude were 
XVIII selling by tens of thousands, more exact methods of work began 
to be applied. Stubbs l began to learn Anglo-Saxon while still 
at school, and employed his holidays in studying rolls in the old 
Court-house of his native Knaresborough. By the time he 
went to Oxford he knew his way about mediaeval documents. 
At the age of twenty-five he accepted a living in Essex, where 
during sixteen tranquil years he found leisure to become the 
greatest English medievalist of his time. His first work was to 
trace the succession of bishops through the centuries. The 
' Registrum Sacrum Anglicanum ' was recognised by the few who 
could appreciate it as a valuable contribution to Church history, 
and at once became an indispensable work of reference. 

His exact scholarship made him a severe critic of the publi- 
cations of the Record Commission. Public money was wasted 
on printing documents of secondary importance, while contem- 
1 porary authorities were rarely chosen. Moreover, the conception 
of the duties of editor was narrow. When the Lives of Edward 
the Confessor appeared Stubbs wrote, ' I am sorry to see the 
philological side of things is to be kept so exclusively in view in 
these publications.' The standard was soon to be raised by the 
critic himself. In 1857 Lord Romilly, Master of the Rolls, 
obtained permission from the Treasury for the publication of 
critical editions of the sources of English history till the end of 
the Middle Ages. The enterprise was mainly directed by Duffus 
Hardy, whose survey of the ' Sources and Documents of English 
History ' was a work of enduring value. Stubbs at once offered 
his services, but it was not till 1863 that the greatest of editors 

1 See Letters of William Stubbs, ed. by W. H. Hutton, 1904 ; Maitland, 
Eng. Hist. Review, July, 1901 ; Quarterly Review, Jan. 1905. 



THE OXFORD SCHOOL 341 

received his commission. For twenty-five years he was to CHAP, 
enrich the Rolls Series with masterpieces of technique and XVIII 
historical learning, which may be said to have inaugurated the 
critical study of mediaeval sources in England. He possessed 
every qualification for his task — palaeographic skill, abundanfT" 
and accurate learning, and a judicial mind. His first volume, 
the ' Itinerary of Richard I,' appeared in 1864 ; his last, the con- 
cluding volume of ' William of Malmesbury,' in 1889. Almost 
all were notable for some definite contribution to history. That 
on Dunstan rescued the character of one of the greatest of English 
ecclesiastics. Those on the early Angevins were furnished with 
historical introductions which presented the first adequate 
picture of the personality of the rulers. The literary ability of 
these massive prefaces was as striking as their erudition. He 
wrote under the immediate impression of his sources. ' I am 
trying to do my Henry II by the light of nature,' he remarked 
in i860. ' I cannot write without feeling it is all my own.' 

While Stubbs was immersed in the Chronicles he was sum- 
moned to the Chair of Modern History at his own University in 
1866. His appointment was greeted by Green in the Saturday 
Review as an agreeable contrast to the nomination of a popular 
novelist to Cambridge and the elevation of a leading meta- 
physician to the Chair of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford. He 
was, in fact, the first trained historian to hold the post. His in- 
augural lecture explained very frankly the new Professor's concep- 
tion of his task. ' The study of modern history is, next to theology 
itself, the most thoroughly religious training the mind can receive. 
It is Christianity that gives the modern world its unity and at the 
same time cuts it off from the death of the past.' But his beliefs 
were never obtruded in his work, and the lecture ends with the 
expression of a hope that he might help to found an historical 
school which should join with foreign workers in a common task. 

During his twenty years at Oxford, Stubbs was occupied with 
his lectures and the ' Constitutional History.' He groaned loudly 
over his statutory duty, to which, however, the world owes some 
of his most brilliant pages. The discourses which he deemed 
worthy of publication appeared on his resignation of the chair. 
The ' Lectures on Mediaeval and Modern History ' give a more 
complete impression of the historian than any of his other 
books. The immense knowledge and variety of theme are not 
more striking than the lightness of touch, the vivid charac- 
terisation, the humour and buoyancy. The superb lectures on 
Literature and Learning at the Court of Henry II, on Henry VII 
and Henry VIII, stand out as masterpieces in a fascinating 



r\ 



342 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, volume. After his death other courses were published which 
XVIII added nothing to his reputation, though that on Europe in the 
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is of interest for its revelation 
of personality. The main interest of the Professor was the 
Constitution. It was not creditable to an educated people, he 
declared, that while its students were well acquainted with the 
machinery of Athens and Rome, they should be ignorant of the 
institutions of their own forefathers. In the year following his 
appointment he informed a friend that he was going to deliver 
eighteen lectures on constitutional history from Tacitus to 
Henry II, and that he had already written most of them. They 
have been published since his death, and it is interesting to 
recover the first draft of his famous work. A second step was 
taken in 1870 by the publication of the ' Select Charters,' which 
has served as a model for similar volumes on other periods and 
other countries. A concise Introduction sketches constitutional 
history to Edward I in bold outline. Freeman hailed it as 
' worthy of the unerring learning and critical power of the first 
of living scholars.' The book was indeed a masterpiece of 
arrangement and interpretation. By selecting the most im- 
portant sources — laws and charters, treaties and chronicles — 
he gave reality to the study of early English history, and by his 
concise elucidations threw light on many obscurities of law and 
practice. Repeatedly revised, the ' Charters ' may be regarded 
as a volume of annotated authorities for the ' Constitutional 
Plistory.' 

Stubbs' masterpiece began to appear in 1874, and was 
immediately recognised as one of the half-dozen most important 
historical works in the language. Its scope is far wider than 
the title indicates. It is virtually a history of England from 
Julius Caesar to the accession of the Tudors— the first compre- 
hensive and authoritative survey of our national life. There is 
little diplomacy or military detail ; but it embraces Church and 
State, law and justice, administration and finance. It is more- 
over, unlike Waitz, its German counterpart, or Gneist, a rival 
in its own field, a record of living men. Maitland has remarked 
with truth that no work on constitutional development is so 
marvellously concrete. ' While the institutions grow and decay 
under our eyes, we are never allowed to forget that this process 
of evolution and dissolution consists of the acts of human beings.' 
By alternating analytical and narrative chapters he combines 
the study of structure with that of the national movement. 
Though he rightly felt that the reconstruction of the main lines 
' of constitutional development was the greatest need of the time, 



THE OXFORD SCHOOL 343 

he never allows his readers to forget how many threads went to CHAP, 
form the web of the nation's life. XVIII 

Stubbs' work was the first attempt to grapple with the whole 
range of English constitutional problems of the Middle Ages. 
He was fond of law, and it was said of him that he might have 
been a great judge. Mr. Bryce, his colleague at Oxford, tells 
us that, unlike Freeman and Green, he had a great interest in 
legal points and unusual capacity for mastering them. The 
first volume, extending to the Norman Conquest, was the least 
original and the least enduring. The materials were scanty and 
difficult of interpretation. ' Many an investigator,' wrote Mait- 
land a generation later, ' will leave his bones to bleach in that 
desert before it is accurately mapped. It may be doubted if he 
was fully aware of the treachery of the ground that he traversed.' 
On the other hand Petit-Dutaillis and Fremont have complained 
that his conclusions were often timid, that he hesitated before 
badly documented periods and shirked decisions on difficult 
problems. Yet caution was perhaps the path of wisdom. He 
was thoroughly acquainted with the works of Waitz and Gneist, 
the Maurers, Brunner and Sohm, and he sometimes followed his 
German guides with too great fidelity. Of his English prede- 
cessors he rated Kemble highest. In 1859 he called him ' my 
pattern scholar.' In 1866 he wrote, ' I am sorry to say that I 
do not believe in Palgrave. Kemble was just as much run away 
with by his own theories, but I think there is much more sense 
in his notions.' He was convinced that England rested on a 
Teutonic foundation. It has been the work of a later generation 
to exhibit the complexhy of Anglo-Saxon England, and he 
cannot be seriously blamed for failing to anticipate their 
researches. Nor can he be censured for mistaking the nature 
of Folkland in company with every scholar before Vinogradoff. 
On reaching Norman times he is on firmer ground. The sources 
were fuller and the problems less thorny. With Henry II 
and his sons he entered a country every by-path of which was 
known to him. So familiar was the period that he wrote his 
admirable little book on the Plantagenets for a popular series 
in six weeks. It is here that his touch is surest, that his charac- 
terisations are most vivid and convincing. Yet he skilfully 
maintains the interest of his story during the fourteenth and 
fifteenth centuries, ' a gloomy, worn-out, helpless age.' He 
shared the traditional error of regarding Magna Charta as the 
work of the nation instead of an effort of the barons to retain 
their privileges ; but the blunders of the second and third volumes 
are surprisingly few. The review of social and political influences 



344 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, at the close of the Middle Ages, with which the work concludes, 

XVIII exhibits his synthetic power at its highest. 

Conspicuous among the merits of the ' Constitutional History ' 
is its imperturbable fairness. ' To read him is a training in 
justice,' declares Maitland, a man of widely different views in 
politics and religion. Outside his books Stubbs expressed 
opinions of a very pronounced character. He supported Austria 
in 1859, spoke of ' the wretched Italians,' denounced ' those 
horrid Poles ' in 1863, and scoffed at Garibaldi's visit to England. 
Mr. Bryce records that he refused to meet a Unitarian minister, 
and the Professor himself proudly told an Oxford audience of 
his skill in piloting a volume of Renan from the hands of Green 
to the waste-paper basket. He solemnly burned a volume of 
Herbert Spencer while Canon of St. Paul's. He laughed at 
Freeman's zeal on behalf of the victims of Turkish misrule. He 
disliked Puritanism, and disapproved Green's glowing narrative 
of the struggle of the seventeenth century. He defined himself 
as steeped in clerical and conservative principles. Yet this man 
of reactionary instincts and violent prejudices judged the con- 
flicts of the past with extraordinary impartiality, and could 
boast with truth that no one could tell his politics from his greatest 
work. He said in one of his Oxford lectures that it was not his 
task to make men Whigs or Tories, but to make the Whigs good, 
sensible Whigs, and Tories good, sensible Tories. His pages are 
wholly free from extravagant eulogy and depreciation. The 
highest justice, he declared, was only to be found in the deepest 
sympathy with erring and straying men. He resists the tempta- 
tion to which Freeman succumbed of idealising Anglo-Saxon 
institutions, and holds the scales even between Henry II and 
Becket. M. Petit-Dutaillis, who has shown his admiration by 
writing a volume of corrective and supplementary studies, 1 goes 
so far as to describe the book as leaning rather to the liberal side. 
Stubbs, he declares, belonged to a generation which rejoiced in 
electoral reforms and the perfecting of political machinery, and 
shared the view of patriotic German scholars that primitive 
German institutions were the source of human dignity and 
independence. 

' The history of institutions,' declared Stubbs in his pregnant 
foreword, ' cannot be mastered, can scarcely be approached, 
without an effort. It has a point of view and a language of its 
own. It reads the exploits and characters of men by a different 
light from that shed by the false glare of arms. It holds out 
small temptation to the mind that requires to be tempted to the 
1 Studies Supplementary to Stubbs, 1908. 



THE OXFORD SCHOOL 345 

study of truth.' The severity of its subject-matter and the CHAP. 
obscurity of many of its topics renders the ' Constitutional XVIII 
History ' by no means easy reading ; but the style is clear and 
vigorous, and in some passages it reaches a high level. In its 
two thousand pages there is not a superfluous word. The work 
was welcomed by scholars all over the world. The Professor 
declared that his first volume had met with more appreciative 
and intelligent reception in Germany than in England. If such 
were the case it was because there were more Germans capable 
of measuring its greatness. He visited Waitz at Gottingen ; but 
the two scholars with whom he was most intimate belonged to 
a younger generation. Pauli, the historian of mediaeval England, 
reviewed his writings as they appeared. Even closer was the 
friendship with Liebermann, who described Stubbs as the greatest 
historian of mediaeval England, and whose monumental edition 
of the Anglo-Saxon laws was hailed by the Oxford Professor as 
' a very splendid, invaluable work.' He was the recipient of 
numberless foreign distinctions, and was everywhere regarded 
as the head of the exact school of history in England. 

When Stubbs accepted the Bishopric of Chester in 1884, he 
announced in his farewell lecture that he had no intention of 
forsaking his old studies, and that he hoped to publish a fourth 
volume of the ' British Councils,' complete his edition of William 
of Malmesbury, and perhaps attempt a sketch of the constitu- 
tional history of the Reformation. Of these plans only the second 
was fulfilled. His new duties, by which he was frankly bored, 
left him scarcely any time for his beloved studies, and deprived the 
world of a revised ' Constitutional History.' He refused to abridge 
it, and the alterations he introduced in successive editions were 
trifling. He followed the work of younger men with unflagging 
interest, but made no real effort to incorporate their results. 
When Mr. Hubert Hall pointed out mistakes in his account of 
the customs, he corrected them. He accepted Vinogradoff's 
interpretation of folkland, but maintained that there was some 
public land, though giving no authority for his belief. He 
refers in a note to Mr. Round's discussion of knight-service, 
but does not modify his text. ' We feel we have had a king,' wrote 
Maitland on his death, ' and are now kingless.' No other English- 
man, he added, had so completely displayed to the world the 
whole business of the historian from the winning of raw material 
to narrating and generalising. His teaching and example had 
made Oxford a centre of systematic study and research ; but 
he was not a profound thinker. When Buckle's work appeared 
Stubbs remarked, ' I don't believe in the philosophy of history, 



346 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, so I don't believe in Buckle.' He rejected Freeman's notion of 
XVIII the unity of history and the more philosophic conception derived 
from Lessing which Temple explained in his famous essay on ' The 
Education of the Human Race.' If we cannot accept the verdict 
of his pupil and biographer that his fame should stand beside 
that of Gibbon as the greatest historian of his country and his 
age, we may agree that he did more to naturalise the methods 
of German scholarship than any other man. 



II 

Though Freeman i was slightly older than Stubbs he always 
regarded him as his master. With Green, who dedicated his 
greatest work to ' my masters in English History,' they form 
what is popularly known as the Oxford School. Yet the two 
historians differed widely in temperament and outlook. Stubbs 
was cool and reserved, Freeman a hero-worshipper and propa- 
gandist. Stubbs was concise, while Freeman was diffuse. The 
former was an extreme conservative, the latter a militant radical. 
The scope of their work was equally different. While Stubbs 
spent his life in mastering mediaeval England, Freeman was 
equally at home in Athens and Rome, Aachen and Constanti- 
nople, Rouen and Winchester. Entering Oxford in 1841, while 
Newman's influence was at its height, he was attracted to 
ecclesiastical architecture, and wavered between the career of 
an architect and the ministry. But secular history gradually 
became his main interest. He competed for a prize on the effects 
of the Norman Conquest, reading Thierry, Lingard, Palgrave 
and the chronicles. His first substantial work, ' A History of 
Architecture,' attacked the archaeologists who neglected history. 
Soon after he published a work on Window Tracery, with his 
own illustrations, and a year or two later co-operated in a history 
of St. Davids. His love of architecture remained, but he came 
to value it less for its intrinsic beauty than for its witness to 
the past. 

Possessed of independent means, Freeman determined to 
dedicate his life to history. For twenty years after taking his 
degree he devoted most of his time to the classical world, 
especially to Greece. He described her enslavement as the most 
melancholy event in history, and dreamed of the recovery of 

1 See Stephens' admirable Life and Letters of Freeman, 2 vols. 1895 ; 
Bryce, Studies in Contemporary Biography, 1903 ; Bemont in Revue 
Historique, vol. xlix. ; Frederic Harrison, Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill, 1899 ; 
York Powell, Occasional Writings, 1906. 



THE OXFORD SCHOOL 347 

Constantinople. He wrote letters and made speeches in modern CHAP. 
Greek, sang the praises of Finlay and formed an enduring XVIII 
friendship with Tricoupis. To the sneer that the Greeks were 
mongrels he replied that Greek blood was no more mixed than 
our own, while the national character had changed but little. 
His enthusiasm for the Christians of the Near East was equalled 
by his hatred of the Turks, and he vigorously opposed the Crimean 
War as an attempt to buttress up a savage tyranny. He was 
profoundly interested in political institutions, and early formed 
a plan of a history of Federal Government, starting with Greece 
and passing through Switzerland and the Netherlands to the 
United States. Only one volume was completed ; but the massive 
fragment was a valuable contribution to the least known chapter 
of Greek history. 1 His exhaustive study of the federations in 
which Greece organised herself after the downfall of her liberty 
was warmly welcomed by classical scholars and is still indis- 
pensable. After a visit to Switzerland, which was to form the 
subject of the second volume, he declared that he loved the Swiss 
from the bottom of his heart ; and his enthusiasm for the simple \ 
democracy of the cantons was to find eloquent expression in 
the celebrated lectures on the English Constitution. 

While mainly engaged on the ancient world, Freeman never 
lost sight of later times. In 1865, at the age of forty-three, he 
determined to become the historian of the Conquest. The most 
important event in our history before the Reformation had never 
been really studied. Thierry was uncritical and built on a false 
hypothesis. Palgrave died before he reached the Conqueror. 
Lappenberg's narrative was a mere sketch. Stubbs had not 
yet planned his ' Constitutional History. ' The ' History of the 
Norman Conquest ' opens with a sketch of Anglo-Saxon England 
and of the settlement of the Norsemen in France. The story 
of the Norman Dukes is related in an admirable chapter, and the 
study of the Danish Kings first revealed their interest and 
importance ; but the author enters on his full stride with Edward 
the Confessor. The hero of the drama is Godwin, and in rescuing 
him from his enemies Freeman places him beside Simon de 
Montfdrt, names him ' the Great,' and pronounces a sounding 
panegyric on his grave. The portrait of Harold is even more 
flattering than that of his father. In the struggle between 
Norman and Saxon his sympathies are with the latter. He is 
penetrated with a sense of William's greatness ; but the picture, 
though accurate and conscientious, lacks life and colour. The 
Conquest was much less disturbing to the life of the nation than 
1 See Bury's preface to the edition of 1893. 



348 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, might have been expected. Above all the free constitution, the 

XVIII glory and pride of England, was not seriously disturbed. The 

popular elements were not submerged, and the great Witans met 

in 1085 and 1086 as the guardians of the sacred principle of 

self-government . 

Freeman wrote with the mastery that came from a profound 
knowledge not only of his immediate subject but of mediaeval 
' Europe. It was, moreover, a labour of love. Worshipping 
political liberty with passionate devotion, he believed that he 
found it among the Teutonic nations, and above all in his own 
country. ' One would say the old Saxon blood flowed unmixed 
in his veins,' declared a German critic. He declared that he 
would gladly have fought under Harold at Senlac. Despite its 
vast length the book is alive. The style, though lacking grace 
and flexibility, is of extraordinary vigour. The spacious struc- 
ture was built on solid foundations, and Green greeted it as a 
perfect miracle of research. His learning must be sought not 
only in the text but in the innumerable appendices attached to 
each volume, many of them dissertations of high value. A 
second source of his strength was a knowledge of the scene of 
the events which he described. He was the first English historian 
to realise the importance of an exact knowledge of the geographi- 
cal site and historical remains in the reconstruction of events. 
The ' Travels in Normandy and Maine ' may be read as a com- 
panion to the ' Norman Conquest.' The birthplace and burial- 
place of the Conqueror and his wife, the towns where he lived, 
the battle-fields where he won his fame, the castles and churches 
which he built — these tangible objects bring the man nearer to us. 
Freeman's view of the place of the Norman Conquest in history 
is subject to considerable reservations. In the reaction against 
Thierry's conception of a cataclysm he under-estimates the area 
of disturbance and exaggerates the rapidity of racial amalgama- 
tion. In his eagerness to establish continuity he accepts evidence 
too readily, and interprets the Witans of the Conqueror's closing 
years too democratically. He exaggerated the popular element 
in the constitution both before the Conquest and after. ' The 
great changes in law and government,' he wrote, ' that we usually 
attribute to the Conqueror belong in most cases to Henry II.' 
But this is to attribute too much originality to the Angevin 
monarch, who developed the ideas of Henry I, which differed 
little from those of his father. His survey of the results of the 
Conquest lacks completeness, owing to his neglect of important 
departments of national life, above all the relations of classes to 
one another and to the Crown. We here touch the main weakness 



THE OXFORD SCHOOL 349 

of the book. It is a political narrative of rare merit ; but it is CHAP, 
not a picture of the life of the people. In a series of outspoken XVIII 
criticisms in the Saturday Review, Green complained of a certain 
narrowness of moral and intellectual sympathy. 1 ' He passes 
silently by religion, intellect, society. He admires the people 
gathered hi its Witan, but he never takes us to the thegn's hall 
or the peasant's hut. Of the actual life, manners, tastes of our 
forefathers the book tells us nothing. It is essentially a work 
of historic reaction.' The criticism, though severe, was in the 
main justified. 2 Freeman believed action alone to be history, 
and in this sphere nothing was too insignificant to escape his 
notice. In the third volume, which deals with the Conquest 
itself, every detail is welcome. But the narrative of petty wars 
and insurrections is not less detailed than that of the events 
which determined the fate of nations. He lacked the selective 
instinct. 

Freeman's knowledge of the chronicles was exhaustive ; but 
he had no taste for manuscripts, and never learned palaeography. , 
Writing in his library at Somerleaze he depended ""on printed 
authorities ; but not even of these did he make full use. Pos- 
sessing little interest in the structure of society he never realised 
the importance of charters. His chapter on Domesday Book is 
amazingly superficial. Mr. Round 3 is largely justified when he 
declares that Freeman belongs to a bygone school. He made 
no discoveries, for discoveries are impossible without research, 
and research is impossible without the stud}^ of manuscripts. 
That institutions and economic conditions were not less im- 
portant than the vicissitudes of rulers and warriors was hidden 
from him. Among minor faults of the book are the aggressive 
Teutonism, the straining of analogies, the repetition of favourite 
phrases, the use of uncouth words such as unright, unlaw and 
mickle. In the angry controvers}^ on the battle of Hastings 
the verdict went against him ; but the matter was of no great 
consequence. 1 Despite its sins of commission and omission, it 
is a work of enduring importance. As Stubbs is the English 
Waitz, Freeman is the English Giesebrecht. The ' Norman 
Conquest ' was supplemented by a work on William Rufus. 
Though the reign was short and relatively uneventful, two 
massive volumes are devoted to it. Every fact recorded in the 

1 Republished in Green's Historical Studies, 1903. 
- Cp. Pauli's criticism, Hist. Zeiischrift, vol. xxxvii. 

3 Article on 'Historical Research,' The Nineteenth Century, Dec. 1898. 

4 See Quarterly Review, 1892-3, and Spatz, Die Schlacht von Hastings, 
1896. 



350 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, chronicles is transferred to the historian's pages, accompanied 

XVIII jjj man y cases by a prolix discussion. Pauli has blamed him for 

accepting the scandalous charges brought against Rufus by his 

enemies the clergy ; but it is impossible to prove they were 

wrong. 

When Stubbs accepted a bishopric, Freeman was naturally 
appointed his successor. In addition to his massive volumes on 
Greece and Norman England he had published an important 
work on the 'Historical Geography of Modern Europe,' three 
volumes of essays, lectures on the Saracens and the Ottomans, 
'The English Constitution ' and ' Comparative Politics,' and in- 
numerable studies of historic towns and districts. Like Stubbs, 
he found no great pleasure in the delivery of his statutory lectures 
and lamented the paucity of advanced students ; yet he spared 
no labour on his duties. Commencing with a course on the 
' Methods of Historical Study,' he followed with surveys of Europe 
in the fifth and eighth centuries and with a sketch of the ■ Chief 
Periods of European History.' The Regius Professor of Modern 
History was curiously ignorant of the last four centuries, and 
wisely chose most of his themes from the Middle Ages. 

His last years were mainly devoted to a subject which lay 
far from the province of his chair. His occupation with Norman 
England kindled his interest in the fair island which was also 
ruled by Norman Kings. For a moment he considered the 
idea of a history of the Normans in Sicily ; but he quickly 
convinced himself that he must go further back. The subject 
possessed a peculiar fascination for him, and he had already 
written a volume on the classical period. The oecumenical 
position of Sicily made the island the theatre of strife between 
East and West. Should it be part of Africa or of Europe ? 
' No one has tried to treat the whole story as a contribution to 
Universal History. It is by this standard I would ask my 
work to be judged. Nowhere do we better learn the folly of 
those arbitrary divisions which have made the study of history 
vain and meaningless.' It was his intention to bring his narrative 
to the death of Frederick II • but it was not to be. He had 
never learned how to condense, and when he died four large 
volumes only brought the story to the beginning of the third 
century B.C. He declared that whereas he had brought many 
facts to light in the ' Norman Conquest,' it was difficult to find an 
absolutely new fact in the early history of Sicily, so exhaustive 
had been the research of Holm. His own contribution lies 
rather in his wonderful knowledge of the island. His enthusiasm 
for his task knew no bounds. ' The Greek tongue,' he declared, 



THE OXFORD SCHOOL 351 

' is the noblest part of the study of language, the history of CHAP. 
Greece the most instructive part of the history of the world.' He XVIII 
returned with delight to Thucydides, ' the greatest of historical 
teachers,' and other judgments of his early manhood were 
confirmed. ' For the democracy of Syracuse, as of Athens, 
we have Grote to our master. And from renewed experience 
I can say once more that Thirlwall is not superseded even by 
him.' 

The work opens with a chapter on Characteristics of Sicilian 
History. The panorama is wide and impressive, the comparison 
of Sicily with other islands suggestive ; but there is much repeti- 
tion, and many allusions confuse rather than enlighten. The 
description of the natural features of the island which follows is 
in his best style ; and the foundation of Syracuse provides occasion 
for a fine rhetorical disquisition on the city's place in history. 
The wars with Carthage and Italy are related with wearisome 
detail ; but no reader will quarrel with the minute narrative 
of the Athenian expedition. The fourth volume, left unfinished 
and prepared for publication by his son-in-law and fellow- 
traveller, Arthur Evans, brings the story down to the Tyranny 
of Agathocles. The work was translated into German and 
received with warm commendation by Holm. Adolf Bauer 
declared that no English work on antiquity since Grote showed 
such wide and profound erudition. It is a noble fragment, 
marred indeed by prolixity, but inspiring in the enthusiasm for 
his theme which animates all his writings. 

The central doctrine of Freeman's works was the Unity of 
History. The Rede Lecture, delivered in 1873, is a landmark 
in English historiography. From early Greece to the Roman 
Empire, from Imperial Rome to mediaeval and modern Europe , 
there was no break ; and he rendered an immense service to { 
historical thinking and teaching by his emphasis on continuity. 
Yet Stubbs devoted a considerable part of one of his lectures to 
an attack on his friend's philosophy. Classical, mediaeval and 
modern history, he declared, could be usefully studied apart. 
In the world of action there was continuity ; but in the world 
of thought and feeling, about which Freeman knew little and 
cared less, there were deep gulfs. A graver criticism may now 
be made. Since Freeman enunciated his doctrine the historian's 
horizon has widened. His vision was confined to Aryan Europe. 
But Greece can no longer be treated as the starting-point of 
civilisation, and the discovery of the Ancient East has altered 
our perspective. Though he insisted on the need of knowing 
alike the classical, the mediaeval and the modern world, his 



352 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, conception of history itself was purely external. The ' Norman 
XVIII Conquest ' contained a chapter on architecture, the ' History of 
Sicily ' a few pages on early Greek literature and, on Hieron's 
relation to Pindar and ^Eschylus. Nine-tenths of human history, 
declared Frederic Harrison, left him without living interest. 
' The keynote of his character,' declares his old friend Mr. Bryce, 
' was the extraordinary warmth of his interest in the persons, 
things and places he cared for and the scarcely less conspicuous 
indifference to matters which lay outside the well-defined 
boundary line of his sympathies. He regarded history as not 
only primarily but almost exclusively a record of political events. 
Past politics, he used to say, were present history. He was not 
interested in religion, philosophy, social or economic conditions, 
and he thought it strange that anyone should be.' He knew 
the churches and castles of England and Europe better than any 
man of his time ; but he is believed only once to have visited 
a picture-gallery, dragged thither by Green. While he cared 
nothing for Plato, the Greek tragedians and Shakespeare, he 
loved old English ballads, admired Scott and rejoiced in 
Macaulay's Lays. The world of ideas had no existence for 
him. Regarding history solely as a record of happenings, he 
recognised continuity but not organic evolution. No less 
philosophic historian has ever lived. His partialities never led 
him into the extravagances of Carlyle and Froude, for he hated 
cruelty. He exaggerated the virtues of Godwin and Harold, 
but he never whitewashed a bad man. Green, who found so 
much to censure in the 'Norman Conquest,' recognised its great 
moral qualities. ' It glows with a passionate love of civil freedom 
and a passionate detestation of all that is cruel and unjust. 
If there is hero-worship it is not the mere craven worship of 
brute force.' His greatest admiration is reserved for men like 
Timoleon and Washington, who knew how to lay aside their 
power. Despite his prejudices and limitations he occupies a 
high place among the writers and teachers of history, and readers 
of every school may find instruction in his virile pages. 



Ill 

Though Green 1 learnt something both from Stubbs and 
Freeman, he was far more original than either. As a boy he 
explored the churches near his Oxford home and took rubbings 

1 See Letters of J . R. Green, ed. Leslie Stephen, 1901 ; Bryce, Studies in 
Contemporary Biography, 1903 ; York Powell, Occasional Writings, 1906 ; 
Monod, Portraits et Souvenirs, 1897. 



THE OXFORD SCHOOL 353 

of brasses. His college life brought him little pleasure ; but CHAP. 
Stanley's lectures on ecclesiastical history made a deep impression XVIII 
and led to an enduring friendship. At twenty-two he em- 
barked on authorship by a series of articles on Oxford in the 
eighteenth century. The easy, graceful style is already virtually 
formed, and the picture of the ancient city with its Jacobite 
dons and rowdy undergraduates is skilfully drawn. Ordained 
at twenty-four he worked for nine years among the poor. His 
time for study was greatly curtailed ; but he used to say in 
later life that his experience of the East End was of assistance 
to his literary work. It was there that he gained the living 
interest in the masses which never deserted him. A paper on 
Dunstan, read at the Somerset Archaeological Society in 1862, 
was a turning-point in his career, for he there met Freeman. 
The elder scholar was struck by the essay — ' a noble defence of 
a noble and slandered man ' — which showed that the writer 
could weigh evidence as well as narrate. Henceforth Freeman 
made it his duty, in his own words, ' to blow Johnny Green's 
trumpet.' Their friendship lasted unbroken till Green's death 
twenty years later, despite their totally different conceptions 
of history. Freeman was annoyed at Green's imaginative 
methods, while the younger man keenly regretted the elder's 
absorption in the outer aspects of history. Yet they had many 
interests in common, and rejoiced in each other's society at home 
and abroad. Freeman generously^ecogn_ijej^bis_debt to his 
brilliant companion. ' I owe the deepest obligations to Green's 
interest in municipal history. His gift of catching the leading 
features in the topography and history of a town was wonderful. 
Whatever I have tried to do in that way I have learned from 
him.' A year later Green met Stubbs on a visit to their common 
friend. The Professor was a less expansive personality, and the 
relations of the older and younger man were never very intimate. 
Yet Stubbs warmly appreciated his work and his services to ( 
English history, and never lost an opportunity of singing his 
praises. 

Freeman introduced Green to the Saturday Review, which 
was then at its zenith. Some of his articles were but sketches, 
quickly thrown off and quickly forgotten ; but many were of 
higher quality, resting on wide study and breaking new ground. 
Green is the creator of the historical causerie, light and graceful 
in form but careful in workmanship and suggestive in thought. 
A few of the essays were collected in the ' Stray Studies from 
England and Italy,' while others were not rescued from oblivion I 
till after his death. Among them are criticisms of historical / 



354 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, works, sketches of foreign towns and glimpses of early French 
XVIII history. The Saturday Review brought a welcome addition to 
the curate's meagre stipend, but it did not exhaust the ambition 
of the historian. He wished to take part in the Rolls Series, 
but confessed that he had never read a manuscript in his life. 
He undertook a volume on the lives of Dunstan, but ultimately 
handed over his materials to Stubbs. He planned a survey of 
the period from Henry I to the death of Henry III, and collected 
material for a history of Anjou and the rule -of the Angevin 
kings. In 1869 he ceased clerical work on succeeding Stubbs 
as librarian at Lambeth ; but at the moment when greater 
I leisure was within his grasp he learned that he could not count 
I on the normal span of life. He must work while it was day. 
The year 1869 witnessed the birth of the conception of the 
' Short History of the English People.' There was no good 
modern summary even of the outward facts of English history, 
still less a survey of the development of civilisation. The 
publication of the ' Short History ' in 1874 forms an epoch in 
historiography. The English-speaking world received the first 
coherent and intelligiole account of its own past. The hero of 
the book was the people ; only thus could English history be 
conceived as a whole. The deeds of kings fall into their proper 
place, and we hear little of drums and trumpets. Chaucer 
occupies more space than Crecy. Dynasties come and go, 
battles are won and lost, but the people remain. That this 
reading of history is now a commonplace is mainly the work 
of Green. Though not the first to enunciate it, he was the first 
to illustrate it in the history of a great nation. The pyramid 
which historians had tried to balance on its apex now rests on 
its base. His work possesses the living interest of a biography 
and the dramatic unity of an epic. 

Not less admirable than the design was the execution. By 
skilful grouping of periods, the omission of burdensome detail, 
a vivid style and sympathy with every aspect of life — social, 
religious, literary, artistic, no less than political — he succeeded 
in reconstructing the development of the British nation within 
the compass of a single volume. The difficulty of such an 
achievement is suggested by the fact that no one but Green 
has accomplished it in England or elsewhere. The first breach 
with tradition was in his division of periods not according to 
reigns or dynasties but according to their governing feature. 
His grouping was highly suggestive, though his commencement 
of the New Monarchy with Edward IV was sharply challenged. 
A second departure was the substitution of a brief sketch for 



THE OXFORD SCHOOL 355 

a detailed narrative of war and diplomacy, thus transferring the ] CHAP, 
emphasis from action and military glory to internal development, XVIII 
and concentrating attention on men, books, ideas and ideals! 
which revealed or influenced national life. ' I dare say you would 
stare,' he wrote to Freeman, ' to see seven pages devoted to the^ 
Wars of the Roses and fifteen to Colet, Erasmus and More. 
The more I think over our story as a whole, the more its political 
history seems to spring out of and be moulded into form by the 
social and religious history you like to chaff me about.' His 
earlier studies had been mainly devoted to the Middle Ages, 
and this part of the ' Short History ' is on the whole the best. 
The mere man of action such as Henry V excites little enthusiasm 
in comparison with Alfred or John Ball, Langland or Caxton. 
He emphasised the influence of towns, discussed the economic 
effects of the Black Death, and traced the Wars of the Roses 
to social and material changes. In surveying his task shortly 
before its completion the historian declared that the sections on 
the New Learning, the Peasant Revolt and the towns were by 
far the best things he had yet written. On entering modern j 
history he was on less familiar ground ; but the chapters on the 
Reformation are of high merit. The sections on the Stuarts are ! 
less satisfactory, and the eighteenth century provided less oppor- 
tunities for his special gifts than any of its predecessors. The 
work ends with the conclusion of the Great War. 

The success of the ' Short History ' was instantaneous. No 
historical work since Macaulay had sold so rapidly. Though 
Freeman objected that much of it presupposed more than 
average knowledge, it became at once a manual for schools and a 
companion for the advanced student. Hundreds of thousands 
of all ages became for the first time intelligently interested in the 
history of their own country. The originality of conception 
and wide learning were generally recognised. The freshness of 
treatment and youthful buoyancy were- the more remarkable in j 
the work of a consumptive under sentence of death. The history 
of England was no longer an old almanack but the development ' 
of a living organism, the English people. The work indeed 
possesses a touch of genius to which neither of the author's 
masters could lay claim. Despite its immense success it did not 
escape criticism. ' All through the earlier part,' wrote Green 
himself, ' I^se^jJaejnd^eHble mark of the essayist, the tendency to 
little vignettes, the jerkiness "," the slurring over the uninterest- 
ing parts. I learnt my trade as I wrote on.' In such a work 
mistakes were inevitable. The truth of the matter was stated by 
Stubbs. ' Like other people he made mistakes sometimes ; but 



356 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, scarcely ever do they affect either the essence of the picture or the 
XVIII force of the argument.' It was also accused of offering a partisan 
presentation of national development. Brewer, the historian 
of Wolsey, denounced it in the Quarterly x as a democratic 
manifesto, which idealised the people and despised their rulers. 
James I was an immoral buffoon, a coward and a drunkard ; 
Charles I a compound of avarice and baseness ; George III 
a vain, selfish and unscrupulous tyrant. He was equally 
possessed with a singular hostility to the Church of England. 
He considered war to be mere butchery, and declared that it 
played a small part in the real story of European nations. Green 
possessed unquestionable genius, but his sympathies appeared 
f to be not with order but with disorder. ' Under the guise of a 
I school history he has disseminated some very violent opinions 
in politics and religion. We protest emphatically against the 
whole tone and teaching of the book.' 

Though Brewer's criticisms were absurdly exaggerated, he was 
not wrong in declaring the ' Short History ' to possess a stand- 
point of its own. Green became increasingly liberal year by 
year, and was one of the earliest of English Home Rulers. He 
loved and honoured Gladstone, ardently sympathised with the 
sufferings and ideals of the people and detested the men in Church 
and State who had oppressed them. 2 In any conflict between 
ruler and ruled he was sure to be found on the side of the latter. 
Thus he relates with deep sympathy the Peasants' Revolt of 
1381, and is an enthusiastic supporter of Parliament against 
the first two Stuarts. There is little attempt to understand the 
royalist position, which Gardiner was beginning to interpret. 
Nor is there a trace of the large-mindedness which was to 
characterise Lecky's treatment of the revolt of the American 
colonies. Yet the work cannot fairly be described as partisan. 
In many instances it is conspicuously impartial. He is fair to 
the Catholic martyrs and severe on the Protestant persecutors. 
He is just to Pitt and Fox. The book is no rhapsody on the 
British race, no thick and thin defence of British policy. He 
tests politics by the principles of morality, and does not fear to 
condemn the treatment of Ireland and Scotland, India, America 
and France. 

A further charge was advanced by Brewer. ' The demand 
for history, lively, attractive, sparkling, has produced the required 
supply. The temptation is great and Green has not always been 

1 Reprinted in Brewer, English Studies, 1881. 

3 Cp. Mrs. Green's speech at the unveiling of the tablet at Jesus College 
in The Times, June 7, 1909. 



THE OXFORD SCHOOL 357 

able to resist it. He has a natural tendency to supply from his CHAP, 
own fertile and fervid imagination the dramatic details lacking XVIII 
in his cold and colourless originals.' A milder variety of this 
indictment is occasionally met with in the ranks of his friends. 
' The imaginative faculty,' declares Mr. Bryce, ' was the leading 
and distinctive quality of his mind and writing. The early 
editions occasionally purchased vividity at the price of exacti- 
tude. His judgment was sometimes dazzled by the brilliance 
of his ingenuity.' He saw everything in colour. ' The fault 
of his style,' declared the Edinburgh Review, ' is a uniformity, 
sometimes almost a monotony, of picturesqueness. We some- 
times feel a fatigue like that experienced in turning over the pages 
of a picture-book.' Against such criticisms may be set Stubbs' 
admiration for ' the wonderful simplicity and beauty of the way 
he tells his tale.' 

While the ' Short History ' was selling by scores of thousands 
in many languages, Green resolved to narrate the fortunes of 
England in greater detail. He threw himself into his task with 
such vigour that four large volumes of the ' History of the English 
People ' were completed by 1880. The scale of ' Big Book ' 
was about double that of ' Little Book ' ; but the scheme 
and method are the same. As an introduction to English history 
it is superior to every work except its own predecessor. Yet it 
may be questioned whether it was worth undertaking. It has 
not superseded the '- Short History,' and it cannot take the place 
of works based on original research. It was written too soon to 
allow fresh study to modify his judgments on particular issues ; 
and it exposed itself to the same criticisms. Gardiner censured 
his habitual negligence in regard to constitutional laws, specially 
marked in the seventeenth century in reference to ship-money, 
benevolences and other contested issues. 

Though the deadly disease now held him tightly in its grip, 
Green plunged with heroic courage into fresh labours. He 
lamented that ' the age of national formation ' should remain 
comparatively unknown, and that its struggles should still be to 
most Englishmen mere battles of kites and crows. ' The Making 
of England,' which he completed, and the ' Conquest of England,' 
which lacked his revision, contain some of his best work. Stanley 
had once said to him, ' I see you are in danger of growing pictur- 
esque. Beware of it. I have suffered myself.' The warning was 
now taken. He possessed a rare power of seizing the features of 
scenery and their effect on historical development. He knew 
and loved England, and in 1880 he and his wife published a 
'Geography of the British Isles.' This exact knowledge of the 



358 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, face of the country, its archaeological remains, its forests, its 
XVIII marshes and its roads, stood him in good stead in the ' Making of 
England.' His numerous maps for the first time traced the 
boundaries of the Kingdoms at different epochs. In addition to 
a detailed study of the invasions and the civil wars, he devotes 
a striking chapter to the Settlement of the Conquerors, their 
culture and institutions. He rejected the continuance of Roman 
culture, and agreed with Freeman in making Anglo-Saxon in- 
stitutions extremely democratic. In the ' Conquest of England,' 
which continues the story from Egbert, he paints Alfred and 
Canute in glowing colours and repeats his unfavourable estimate 
of Godwin. ' The difference between Green and Freeman,' 
wrote Creighton after reading the two works, ' is enormous. 
Freeman tries to make you understand each detail by isolating 
it and surrounding it with nineteenth-century settings. He 
iterates and reiterates, but you don't see it. In the Making 
and the Conquest the whole thing moves together.' i The 
volumes still remain the most illuminating and attractive picture 
of Anglo-Saxon times that we possess. 

Green's death in 1883 at the age of forty-six was an irre- 
parable blow to historical study. In discussing the choice of 
an epitaph he had said, ' Do you know what they will say of me ? 
" He died learning." ' Grant Duff declared that had he lived he 
would have been the greatest English historian since Gibbon. 
Mr. Bryce believes that many wiU place him near Macaulay, 
for, though less weighty, he was more subtle and not less fascinat- 
ing. He also finds in him something of Gibbon, ' the combination 
of a mastery of details with a large and luminous view of those 
far-reaching forces and relations which govern the fortunes of 
peoples and guide the course of empire.' His ' Short History ' is 
less likely to be superseded than any other work of the Oxford 
school. 

1 Creighton's Life, i. 264. 



CHAPTER XIX 

GARDINER AND LECKY, SEELEY AND CREIGHTON 



While Froude was occupied with the Tudors a far less bril- CHAP. 

YTY 

liant but far more trustworthy historian began his lifelong -*- 1 -*- 
study of the Stuarts. It is Gardiner's 1 glory to have narrated 
the most critical and controversial period of our history for the 
first time with complete knowledge and unerring judgment. 
With the possible exception of Stubbs' ' Constitutional History ' 
his volumes form the most solid and enduring achievement of 
British historiography in the latter half of the nineteenth century. 
No attempt had been made to discover how the events of the time 
appeared when investigated solely from contemporary records. 
Royalist and Whig historians had seen what they wished to see. 
Ranke's monumental work was only beginning to appear, and he 
owed more to John Bruce, editor of the Calendars of State Papers 
and other documents, than to any of the well-known historians. 
He used to censure Guizot for beginning his ' History of the 
English Revolution ' with Charles I, on the ground that a 
thorough study of James I was essential to the understanding 
of the struggle. The first two volumes appeared in 1863, 
covering the first half of the reign. For nearly forty years 
the undertaking was pursued without haste and without rest. 
He set his heart on reaching the Restoration, but died while 
engaged on the year 1656. 

His work was the first narrative based on an exhaustive study 
of the vast mass of authorities reposing in public and private 
archives. The evidence of newspapers and pamphlets was freely 
used. Memoirs, however illustrious their author, were treated 
as secondary, not as primary, authorities. To compare the 

1 See Diet. Nat. Biog. (by Firth) ; York Powell in Eng. Hist. Review, 
April 1902 ; 'Two Oxford Historians' (Green and Gardiner), in Quarterly 
Review, April 1902. 



360 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, footnotes of a chapter of Gardiner with those of any previous 
XIX wor k j s to rea ii se the advance. The judge had at last all the 
facts before him, and he knew what use to make of them. He 
overthrew the Whig tradition of the reign of the first two^tuarts 
which had dominated England since Hallam and the Reform Bill ; 
but he never doubted that Parliament was on the side of the future 
and that it was well that the policy of James and Charles was 
defeated. His originality lay not in his judgment of the result 
of the great struggle, but in his delineation of the leading actors and 
in his estimate of the relation of the rival policies to the practice 
and tradition of the past. ' In this world of mingled motives,' 
he remarks quietly, ' the correctness of a political or religious 
creed does not form a test by which to distinguish the noble 
from the ignoble man.' If it be one of the chief duties of an 
historian to render the actors in his drama intelligible, Gardiner 
was one of the greatest of his profession. His complete knowledge 
and catholicity of temper enabled him to understand men who 
could not understand one another. He saw the grandeur of 
the ideals of Bacon as clearly as Spedding, and respected the 
courage of Coke and Pym as much as Macaulay. His readers 
are never allowed to forget how much each side contributed to 
the making of England. 

He departs from the Whig tradition in the first place in 
regard to James I. Previous writers had based their conception 
of James chiefly on the memoir-writers and anecdote-mongers, 
and the public took its notions from the ' Fortunes of Nigel.' 
While Macaulay described the face and emphasised the oddities, 
Gardiner has little to tell of the outer man. Rejecting the stories 
of drunkenness and immorality, he shows the monarch to have 
been very different from the buffoon of popular literature. ' He 
desired to act rightly, to see justice done to all, to direct his 
subjects in the ways of peace and concord, and to prevent religion 
from being used as a cloak for polemical bitterness. His own 
ideas were usually shrewd. But he had too little tact and too 
unbounded confidence in his own not inconsiderable powers to 
make a successful ruler.' His policy both at home and abroad 
was a failure, and he sowed the seeds of revolution and disaster. 
The portrait of his son is less opposed to the prevalent tradition, 
though the censure is more gently conveyed. ' A want of imagina- 
tive power lay at the root of his faults. Conscious of the purity 
of his own motives, he never ceased to divide mankind into two 
simple classes — those who agreed with him and those who did 
not, into sheep to be cherished and goats to be rejected.' In 
dealing with the latter he persuaded himself that it was lawful 



GARDINER AND LECKY, SEELEY AND CREIGHTON 361 

to employ deception. Both sides could appeal to tradition. In CHAP, 
the fifteenth century Parliamentary privilege stood high, in the XIX 
sixteenth the prerogative. The spirit of the new world was 
with the Parliament ; but all around strong monarchies were in 
existence. The conviction that enlightened autocracy was the 
best form of government was held not only by rulers themselves 
but by many of the noblest minds of the time. James had given 
powerful expression to his views before he ascended the English 
throne. Bacon sincerely believed that the philosophic King 
would rule more wisely than representatives of the people. To 
this ideal of enlightened and God-fearing autocracy Gardiner 
renders full justice, while recognising that James and Charles 
were too mediocre to carry it out and that it was only suitable 
to backward peoples. 

It was not the political theory of James and Charles that 
was new. England was advancing in wealth and culture, new 
ideas of political liberty had been sown by the Reformation, 
and the personal government that had seemed reasonable in the 
strong hands of Elizabeth appeared less natural in those of James. 
Moreover, the struggle for national existence ended with the defeat 
of the Armada. The controversy was sharpened by a circum- 
stance which had no connection with politics. The purchasing 
power of money had fallen rapidly owing to the great increase 
of specie from the mines of Spanish America. The old taxes 
and levies no longer sufficed to meet the needs of the State. Thus 
the increased demand for money led to suspicion and to a demand 
for a closer supervision of its distribution. A second factor 
of aggravation was that the Kings adopted the Anglicanism 
which to many Puritans seemed hardly distinguishable from 
Rome. The suspicion was increased by their refusal to throw 
their whole weight into the Protestant scale in the Thirty Years' 
War, and by their friendliness to the Catholic Powers. The 
conversion of James' consort and the marriage of Charles with 
a Catholic princess suggested that the key of the fortress was 
being delivered to the enemy. Gardiner shows that the Kings 
were loyal Protestants, and that they were right in refusing to 
steer the ship direct into the tornado of the Continental war. The 
mazes of European politics, he declares, formed for the Commons 
a labyrinth without a thread. No part of the work is of greater 
value than that which for the first time revealed the foreign 
policy of James, unskilful in execution but not unstatesmanlike 
in design. A third cause of friction was presented in a new light. 
Nothing exasperated opinion more than the favour shown by 
both monarchs to Buckingham, whom Whig historians had 



362 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, presented as a typical favourite, selfish, vain and incapable. 
XIX Gardiner's portrait is less flattering than that of Ranke, but he 
credits him with patriotism. ' If, however, it is only just 
to class him among ministers rather than among favourites, 
he must rank among the most incapable ministers of this or 
any other country.' More striking is the interpretation of 
Strafford. Pointing out that Wentworth accepted the theory 
neither of a Parliamentary executive nor of Divine Right, he 
declares that his entry into the government was in no sense 
an apostasy, and finds in him the heir of Bacon, a lesser 
Richelieu. His capital error was the failure to recognise that 
the Elizabethan constitution was out of date, and that no 
stable constitutional edifice could be raised with Charles for its 
foundation. 

Though he thus brushes away the charges of autocratic 
innovations and treason to the national religion, he is none the 
less convinced that the system of personal rule was impossible 
and degrading, and that the King's lack of tact and hatred of 
compromise made it appear peculiarly odious. On the other 
hand, though his opinion of the character of the Parliamentary 
leaders is as high as that of any Whig historian, he finds their 
outlook in some respects narrower than that of the monarchs. 
' We look in vain,' he remarks in discussing the quarrels of 
1625, ' for any sign of openness to the reception of new ideas, 
or for any notion that the generation in which they lived was not 
to be as the generation which had preceded it.' His analysis 
of Coke's political philosophy reveals a mind at least as conserva- 
tive as that of his sovereigns. Again, there is no ground for 
charging with sycophancy the judges who pronounced in favour 
of the prerogative. The precedents were conflicting, and men 
of honour might well differ in their verdict. While recognising 
the zeal and good intentions of Laud, he sums up strongly against 
his policy. The Archbishop was a loyal Protestant, but it was 
difficult for Puritans to believe it when they saw their friends 
imprisoned and mutilated. The vindictive punishment of 
ecclesiastical offences contributed more than anything else 
to the popular exasperation. The Star Chamber, which had 
hitherto been little concerned with political cases, now gained 
the reputation of a tool of despotism and the organ of the Roman- 
ising party. Laud, he declares with severity, sought to train up 
a generation in habits of thought which would have extinguished 
all desire for political liberty. In the early stages of the Long 
Parliament the historian is naturally against the Court, and he 
places the main responsibility for the outbreak of war on the King. 



GARDINER AND LECKY, SEELEY AND CREIGHTON 363 

In claiming executive control for Parliament Pym broke with CHAP, 
precedent and tradition ; but the demand was only formulated XIX 
after failing to obtain ministers trusted by Parliament, and 
after convincing himself that nothing else would terminate the 
system of personal rule. When the war began the King's worst 
quality, duplicity, hurried him towards the abyss. Gardiner's 
minute research in foreign archives has established the fact 
that the King stuck at nothing to regain his power and that 
a compromise was impossible. So penetrated is he with the 
impossibility of Charles that he has no words of blame for 
his execution. 

As the figure of Cromwell emerges we enter on new problems. 
' He was a brave, honourable man, striving, according to his lights, 
to lead his countrymen into the paths of peace and godliness.' 
He depicts him as opportunist, moderate, even conservative, 
frightened by the levelling doctrines around him, moving forward 
to supreme power with unwilling steps, and penetrated with the 
impermanence of any regime that did not rest on the assent of 
Parliament. In intention the expulsion of the Rump was a 
step to a return to representative government. When he had 
reached supreme power, his most earnest desire was to transform 
a military into a civil State. While convinced of his lifelong 
sincerity, Gardiner pronounces it the most natural thing in the 
world that other men should think him a hypocrite. The 
narrative was interrupted in 1656 ; but his mature judgment 
of the man and his work was given in the Ford Lectures on 
' Cromwell's Place in History ' and in the illustrated monograph 
in the Goupil series. No historian has rendered more ample 
justice to his noble character and lofty ideals ; but the estimate 
of his ability is a little grudging, and he is a sharp critic of his 
statesmanship. As a soldier he pronounces him inferior to Mont- 
rose. He unhesitatingly condemns both his Irish record and his 
aggressive foreign policy. ' Puritanism still had a hold on his 
heart ; but for all that it was the material, the mundane aspect 
of politics which had gained the upper hand, at least as far as 
foreign politics were concerned.' He is clear that the Protector- 
ate was bound to end in failure owing to the inherent difficulties 
of his situation. Representing as he did a minority, Oliver could 
only maintain himself by force. The army was enormously 
expensive, and a representative Chamber would have refused 
supplies. We receive a melancholy impression of a good man . 
struggling with adversity, his constructive work a failure. ' It is 
impossible to resist the conclusion that Cromwell effected nothing 
in the way of building up where he had pulled down, and that 



364 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, there was no single act of the Protectorate that was not swept 
XIX away at the Restoration without hope of revival.' 

Gardiner has been well described as a Puritan purged of all 
harshness and narrowness. It has been held that his connection 
with the Irvingites aided him to understand the exaltation of 
the Puritan sects ; but no one could tell from his work to what 
Church or party he belonged. While it has been the task of 
many writers to rekindle the passions of the past in their flaming 
pages, it is his aim to exhibit the historian not only as the judge 
but the peacemaker. His sovereign achievement is to have 
interpreted the Royalist and Parliamentary cause with equal 
insight to the modern world ; but his work possesses many 
other merits. His account of foreign policy, based on prolonged 
researches in Simancas and the archives of many lands, is by 
far the best we possess of any period of our history. His studies 
of finance broke new ground. His competence as a military 
historian surprised the readers of the ' Civil War,' and the 
volumes on the Commonwealth and Protectorate showed him 
equally at home in naval warfare. 

With one exception Gardiner possessed all the tools of his 
craft — an accurate mind, perfect impartiality, insight into charac- 
ter, sympathy with ideas different from his own and from one 
another. The exception was style. Had he possessed that 
talisman, his noble work would have been a popular classic. 
His pages are wholly lacking in grace and distinction. On the 
other hand, they are free from prolixity and exaggeration. From 
time to time we feel the pulse of life beating beneath the studied 
reserve of the narrative. Perhaps the highest point is reached 
in the chapters on the trial and death of Strafford, impressive 
in their suggestion of inevitable doom. The work belongs to the 
department of political histories. He employed a lifetime to 
narrate the events of two critical generations, and he performed 
his task so thoroughly that it need not be done again. It is 
idle to blame him for devoting so little space to culture and 
economic growth. He discharged the duty that above all 
needed to be accomplished, and laid the foundation on which 
others can build. He lived the modest life of a scholar, happy in 
his work and the appreciation of historians all over the world, 
caring nothing for fame and fortune. In loyalty to his self- 
imposed task he refused the Regius Professorship at Oxford on 
the death of Froude. Yet his knowledge was not confined to 
the seventeenth century. He wrote the best text-book of 
English History. For thirty years he was Director of the Camden 
Society, for which he edited a dozen volumes. He succeeded 



GARDINER AND LECKY, SEELEY AND CREIGHTON 365 

Creighton as Editor of the English Historical Review. When CHAP. 
Father Gerard tried to prove that the Gunpowder Plot had been XIX 
organised by Robert Cecil to ruin the Catholics and confirm his 
position, he turned aside to vindicate the essentials of his narra- 
tive. No Englishman of his time or of any time did more to raise 
the standard of responsibility in historical work, and he has 
left us the most exact and impartial account of any period in 
the history of our race. 

II 

While Gardiner devoted his life to a single century, Lecky 1 
ranged at large over the history of the world. Destined for a 
family living in the south of Ireland, he studied divinity at 
Trinity College, Dublin ; but at twenty-one he published an 
anonymous work on the religious tendencies of the age which 
showed that the Church was no place for him. His earliest 
and strongest interest was in the history and literature of his 
country. ' He studied the speeches of the principal orators,' 
writes a college friend, ' and could repeat by heart many passages 
from them. He was saturated with the writings and poetry of 
the patriotic party, and he looked on the author of " Who fears 
to speak of '98 ? " with feelings of unbounded admiration. 
Patriotism seemed to be his one absorbing passion.' His en- 
thusiasm found vent in his ' Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland.' 
Immaturity is stamped on its pages, and the epilogue breathes 
a fiery nationalism ; but the essays are not without power. 
The author concealed his name, and not more than thirty copies 
were sold. 

The complete failure of the book turned his energies into 
a widely different field. His multifarious reading, his travels 
in the Catholic South, and his admiration for Buckle suggested 
a line of study of which the first-fruits appeared in the ' History 
of Rationalism.' The new book was the work of a thinker and a 
scholar, though its author was only twenty-seven. George 
Eliot ~ pointed out its faults with rather excessive emphasis ; 
but it remains one of the works which every student of the psy- 
chological evolution of humanity must read. The ' History of 
European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne,' which appeared 
four years later, marks a further advance. Its learning is even 
more comprehensive, the arrangement more skilful, the style 
richer and stronger ; and it is not suprising that it remained its 

1 See Memoir of W. E. H. Lecky, by bis wife, 1909. 

2 Her article is reprinted in her Essays. 



366 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, author's favourite work. Tennyson pronounced it ' a wonderful 
XIX book for a young man to have written, a great book for any 
man to have written.' When he added that it proved the author 
to possess true genius he overshot the mark. Lecky's mind was 
critical, not creative. The picture of the steady and irresistible 
march of rationalism had caused widespread alarm. The 
survey of ethical theories in the introductory chapter announced 
the author's repudiation of utilitarian solutions, and declared 
his belief that the disintegrating intellectual processes of the 
modern world would inflict no injury in the field of morals. The 
studies of Rationalism and Morals made their way all over the 
world, and their undiminished popularity gave Lecky the great- 
est satisfaction during his closing years. They deserved their 
success. They were among the earliest notable endeavours to 
broaden the conception of history by penetrating behind the 
screen of action. An interesting letter explains their author's 
purpose. ' The two books are closely connected. They are an 
attempt to examine the merits of certain theological opinions 
according to the historical method. The first is a history of the 
imposition of those opinions on the world, the second a history 
of their decay. They belong to a very small school of historical 
writings which began with Vico, was continued by Condorcet, 
Herder, Hegel, Comte, and found its last great representative 
in Buckle. What characterises these writers is that they try 
to look at history, not as a series of biographies or accidents or 
pictures, but as a great organic whole.' 

At the age of thirty Lecky had won a European reputation 
<*by his studies in the evolution of ideas ; but the rest of his life 
was devoted to modern political history. Froude had claimed 
the sixteenth century, Gardiner was at work on the seventeenth ; 
the eighteenth was still open. Lord Stanhope's narrative, 
conscientious and useful as it was, lacked breadth and colour, 
and was only read by students. Lecky's ambition was to present 
a broad and luminous survey of life and policy, of institutions 
and tendencies. Much of biographical, military and party 
interest was suppressed in order to find place for the monarchy, 
the aristocracy and the democracy, the Church and Dissent, the 
agricultural, manufacturing and commercial interests, the Press, 
religion, social conditions, and the relations of the mother country 
to its dependencies. The ' History of England in the Eighteenth 
Century ' appeared in eight massive volumes between 1878 and 
1890, and immediately took rank as a classic. In a later edition 
the Irish chapters were disentangled from the English, and the 
work is most conveniently treated as consisting of two separate 



GARDINER AND LECKY, SEELEY AND CREIGHTON 367 

parts. The English volumes cannot be said to provide a history CHAP, 
of the eighteenth century. The period preceding the accession XIX 
of George III is a mere sketch, while the narrative stops in 1793 
with the outbreak of the Great War. He is far more readable and 
impartial than Stanhope ; but Stanhope's humdrum annals are 
still of use for their detailed narrative of the first two Georges. 
The survey of the development of the Whig party from the 
Revolution possesses considerable interest ; but as a history in 
the grand style the work only covers the first thirty-three 
years of the reign of George III. He possessed something 
of Gardiner's power to sympathise with both sides. The 
narrative of the American war is a triumph of impartiality. 
It is of these chapters that Acton wrote to the author that 
they were fuller of political instruction than anything that 
had appeared for a long time. If there is a hero it is neither 
Chatham nor Pitt, but Burke. There was more of the charlatan 
in Chatham, he declared, than in any other very great English- 
man, and both he and his son delighted in a kind of ostentatious 
virtue. Burke and Fox, on the other hand, sacrificed incom- 
parably more for their principles. Among the most successful 
portions of the work are two chapters which may almost be 
described as digressions, the first a survey of the work of 
Wesley and the state of religious thought, the second a summary 
of the causes of the French Revolution. 

By far the most original and important part is that which 
concerns Ireland. Before commencing the history of the 
eighteenth century he had rewritten his ' Leaders of Public 
Opinion,' omitting its flamboyant rhetoric, but retaining the 
nationalist standpoint. In approaching the composition of his 
principal work his determination to relate the critical period of 
Irish history in minute detail was mainly due to the appearance of 
Froude's volumes. ' His whole nature,' writes his wife, ' revolted 
against the spirit of intolerance of which Mr. Froude was the 
advocate and the use he made of his authorities.' After prolonged 
research in the archives of Dublin Castle he revealed to the world 
the true history of the Grattan Parliament, the rebellion of 1798 
and the Union. The work was so thoroughly done that it does 
not need to be repeated. These volumes rank with Gardiner's 
narrative of the struggles of the seventeenth century, and con- 
stitute Lecky's highest achievement. 

The Irish volumes, like the English, but with more excuse, 
merely sketch the earlier half of the century. The stream broadens 
with the appearance of the Volunteers and the establishment of 
an independent legislature in 1782. Though a Protestant 



368 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. Assembly elected by Protestant votes, the Parliament showed 
XIX itself to be inspired by a healthy nationalism. Its attitude to 
the Catholic majority was not unfriendly, and its loyalty to the 
English connection beyond reproach. Its great spokesman 
was perhaps the noblest political figure of his time, and the 
volumes form one long tribute to Grattan's character, policy and 
genius. A great step forward was taken with the concession of 
the franchise to Catholics in 1793; and the dispatch, of Lord 
Fitzwilliam seemed to herald further concessions. In the con- 
troversy over his policy and recall Lecky takes his stand without 
hesitation on the side of the Viceroy ; and in the terrible years 
which followed he is unstinting in his condemnation of blind 
repression. He contends that it was the harsh and blundering 
policy of the Government that drove masses of men into the rebel 
camp whom reasonable concessions would have kept loyal. He 
believes that the rebellion of 1798 made Union inevitable, but he 
does not yield to Grattan in indignation at the methods by which 
it was accomplished. His patient research enabled him to unravel 
every thread of that sordid story. He recognises the ability of 
Clare and the skill of Castlereagh, but he pronounces the whole 
unbribed intellect of Ireland to have been against the measure. 
His pages prove that the Union bore the same relation to ordinary 
legislation as martial law to civil jurisprudence. 

While he was at work on the Grattan Parliament the Home 
Rule controversy burst upon the country. His half-forgotten 
book on ' Irish Leaders ' was pillaged for missiles, but he ranged 
himself without hesitation among G]adstone's opponents. The 
letters published in his biography dispel the charge of incon- 
sistency. He had welcomed the Land Act of 1870, and he enter- 
tained the greatest respect for such Home Rulers as his friends 
Gavan Duffy and O'Neill Daunt ; but he felt the strongest 
repugnance to Parnell and his associates. How intense was his 
distrust of the capacity of his countrymen appears in a curious 
letter of 1880. ' I think you will soon find the opinion growing 
up on all sides that Ireland is unfit for the amount of representa- 
tive government she possesses, and that a government on the 
Indian model may become a necessity.' He disliked the Local 
Government Bill of 1898 passed by his own party, and ' hoped it 
would not do much harm.' The Home Rule conflict made him 
a politician and drove him into Parliament. He took a gloomy 
view of the future, and on the last day of 1893 he wrote in his 
commonplace book, ' the world seems to me to have grown very 
old and very sad.' It was under the influence of this pessimism 
that he wrote ' Democracy and Liberty,' a passionate attack on 



GARDINER AND LECKY, SEELEY AND CREIGHTON 369 

the newer developments in the political and industrial world. CHAP. 
The book is the work of an angry partisan, and no part of it is XIX 
so bitter as that which deals with Ireland. Yet his reading of 
Irish history never altered. The closing months of his life were 
occupied with the further expansion of the work which he had 
published in 1861 and revised in 1871. Grattan is still the 
statesman working nobly for the progress of his country in 
cordial loyalty to England. The essay contained an exhaustive 
discussion of the recall of Fitzwilliam in the light of recent 
pronouncements by Lord Rosebery and Lord Ashbourne in 
their biographies of Pitt. He concedes that the Viceroy was 
guilty of technical mistakes, but maintains that Pitt committed 
an irreparable blunder in recalling the man whom the great 
majority of Irishmen trusted and loved. The second volume 
was devoted to O'Connell. Whi]e gently recognising his faults, 
he is convinced of his utter sincerity and whole-hearted devotion 
to his country. He had no objection to a nationalism which 
respected the rights of property, repudiated violence and was 
loyal to the British Crown. It was fitting that the life of a scholar 
whose greatest achievement was the vindication of the Grattan 
Parliament should end with the revision of a mellow, almost 
tender, biography of the greatest of Irish nationalists. 



Ill 

Though no historian of his time took a more limited view 
of the province of history than Seeley, 1 it was not because his 
own interests were few or his outlook narrow. Beginning with 
a critical edition of the first book of Livy, he obtained his 
most brilliant success as the author of ' Ecce Homo,' and in his 
closing years wrote a charming sketch of Goethe. His first his- 
torical writings were the ' Lectures and Essays ' published in 1870, 
a year after he succeeded Kingsley as Regius Professor of Modern 
History at Cambridge. The inaugural lecture was character- 
istically devoted to the teaching of politics. Why should history 
be studied ? asked the Professor. Because it is the school of 
statesmanship, came the answer. ' Our University is and must 
be a great seminary of politicians. Without at least a little 
knowledge of history no man can take a rational interest in 
politics, and no man can form a rational judgment about them 

1 See Prothero's brief memoir prefixed to his Growth of British Policy, 
1S95 ; Tanner, Eng. Hist. Review, July 1895 ; H. A. L. Fisher, Fortnightly 
Review, Aug. 1896 ; and Adolf Rein's excellent monograph, Seeley, Eine 
Studie iiber den Historiker, 19 12. 

2 B 



370 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, without a good deal.' That this obvious truth was so little 
XIX recognised was due to the common error that history dealt with 
the remote past. It was to modern history that he invited the 
attention of the young men ' from whom the legislators and 
statesmen of the next age must be taken ' ; and it was in modern 
history that he was to find the theme of his three chief historical 
works. 

The earliest and largest was the ' Life and Times of Stein, 
or Germany and Prussia in the Napoleonic Age.' His plan was 
to approach the history of Napoleon from a new angle, and thus 
to illustrate the principles at issue between him and his enemies. 
The great work of constructive reform which followed the disaster 
of Jena was rarely understood, and Stein was merely a name in 
England. The book contained no revelations, for he consulted 
no manuscripts ; but he was acquainted with practically the 
whole mass of printed authorities. His thesis was that a reform 
took place in Germany not less far-reaching than in France and 
without its attendant horrors. The problem of transforming 
Prussia into a modern State was accomplished in the main by 
Stein, whom Seeley, following Hausser, compares to Turgot. 
Though hero-worship was no temptation to his calm and austere 
temperament and biographical details had no attraction for him, 
he does not conceal his admiration for the steadfast courage and 
unfailing sanity of the great statesman whose name stands at 
once for national independence and internal reform. 

Seeley was possessed with a lifelong detestation of Napoleon 
and the conception of a universal state. He embodies the 
struggle of the good and evil principle — nationality versus 
universal dominion — in Stein and Napoleon. He censures 
Frederick William III for not drawing the sword a year before 
Jena, and again in 1809 and 1812. Had he joined Russia and 
Austria in the year of Austerlitz, the result might have been 
different, whereas in 1806 he stood alone. Had he joined Austria 
in 1809 he might have turned the scale. Had he attacked 
Napoleon in flank after the disasters of 1812 he might have saved 
the bloodshed of Leipzig and Waterloo. Seeley never doubts 
the patriotism of the King ; but the struggle was maintained 
by other men. Next to Stein himself he places Fichte, of whose 
soul-stirring •' Addresses to the German People ' he speaks with 
enthusiasm. His chapters provide the English reader with the 
best summary of the epoch-making changes which abolished 
serfdom and established municipal self-government. The reform 
of the army by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, the foundation of 
the University of Berlin, the austere personality of Niebuhr, the 



GARDINER AND LECKY, SEELEY AND CREIGHTON 371 

educational labours of the Humboldts, take their place among CHAP, 
the factors of regeneration. The ' Life of Stein ' has never x * x 
become a popular favourite, but its worth is known to those who 
have taken the trouble to read it. For England it was the 
revelation of a great statesman and an heroic epoch. The 
historian was justified in his claim that it was abundance of 
matter, not diifuseness of style, that had made the book so large. 
To Germany it was also welcome as the first adequate biography 
of the statesman whom the vast and amorphous compilation 
of Pertz had hidden rather than revealed, and it retained its 
place till the appearance of Lehmann's exhaustive study a 
generation later. If the work has a fault it is its portrait of the 
Emperor. His short life of Napoleon, written for the ' Encyclo- 
paedia Britannica ' and republished in an expanded form, again 
revealed his inability to recognise the greatness of a man whose 
policy he abhorred. 

If the book met with less than its legitimate success, his 
next work brought ample compensation. ' The Expansion of 
England ' occupies a place in political history as well as in a 
record of historiography ; for it appeared at a moment when the 
nation was becoming interested in the colonies and the Empire. 
We had conquered and peopled half the world, declared Seeley, 
in a fit of absence of mind, and even now we had not ceased to 
think of ourselves as a race inhabiting an island off the northern 
coast of Europe. This insularity had affected historians, who 
made too much of the parliamentary wrangles of the eighteenth 
century, and failed to perceive that our history was not in England 
but in America and Asia. The two courses of lectures dealt 
with the conquest of Canada and India, explaining with extra- 
ordinary clearness the relation between the foundation of the 
British Empire and the conflict with France. ' The main struggle 
of England from the time of Louis XIV to the time of Napoleon 
was for the possession of the New World.' He knew how to 
produce effects by focussing a brilliant light on the principal 
factors, exhibiting the connection between apparently isolated 
occurrences, and bringing the reader by a number of paths to 
the same conclusion. He loved large surveys, comprehensive 
generalisations, international problems. ' He was much more 
at home,' wrote a pupil, ' dealing with a century than a decade. 
The whole drift of his mind was towards the suggestive treatment 
of large phenomena rather than the microscopic investigation of 
details. His method was astronomical. He swept the whole 
heaven with his telescope.' His thesis was less original than he 
suggested, but he was the first to work it out. 



3?2 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. Though the ' Expansion of England ' became one of the text- 
XIX books of Imperialism, its spirit was by no means that of un- 
restrained enthusiasm for empire or for the methods by which it 
was built up. While emphasising the importance of the move- 
ment, he left it an open question whether it was a matter for 
exaltation or regret. ' Bigness is not necessarily greatness. 
If by remaining in the second rank of magnitude we can hold 
the first rank morally and intellectually, let us sacrifice mere 
material magnitude.' He draws a sharp distinction between 
the white colonies and India, the possession of which, he declared, 
increased our responsibilities but not our power. He rejects 
the notion that the vastness of the Empire proves some invincible 
heroism or some supernatural genius for government in our 
nation. Thus the book stimulates reflection rather than exalta- 
tion, and emphasises rather the magnitude than the glory of our 
inheritance. If it was as much a political dissertation as a 
scientific inquiry, it was enriched by ample knowledge and 
emphasised the fundamental truth that the present is the 
child of the past. 

The last ten years of Seeley's life were mainly occupied with 
the study of British foreign policy. Like Ranke, to whom he 
owed most, he regarded history as concerned mainly with the 
life of states. His books had been international studies, and he 
delighted to lecture on English diplomacy in the time of William 
and Marlborough. His collection of original material was 
enormous, and he possessed the art of distilling its essence. His 
first plan was to begin with 1688 ; but as it became clear that, 
some introduction was needed, he pushed his starting-point ever 
further back. Finally he commenced with the accession of 
Elizabeth, and when overtaken by death had only reached the 
reign of William III. The fragment filled two small volumes, 
which were published after his death. 

The '- Growth of British Policy ' traced the making of a Great 
Power and the influence of the religious and dynastic struggles 
of the Continent on the statecraft of the island kingdom. ' Eng- 
lish eyes,' he wrote, ' are always bent upon Parliament, English 
history always tends to shrink into mere Parliamentary history ; 
and there is scarcely a great English historian who does not 
sink somewhat below himself in the treatment of foreign 
relations.' It was his ambition to produce an English counter- 
part to Droysen ; but he describes the book as an essay; not a 
history. The foreground is occupied by the figures of Elizabeth y 
Cromwell and William III,- who raised England to the lofty 
position she held among the nations when the eighteenth century 



GARDINER AND LECKY, SEE LEY AND CREIGHTON 373 

opened. The erudition is largely concealed. Scarcely a reference CHAP, 
is given, and details are kept in the background ; but few books XIX 
leave such an impression of lucidity and grasp. His power of 
marshalling facts was unrivalled, and no one except Ranke was 
more successful in making the reader feel the diplomatic unity 
of Europe. The work opens with a study of the growth of the 
House of Hapsburg, and there are chapters in which England is 
scarcely mentioned ; but it is not long before the threads are 
interwoven. He believed that the destiny of a State depended 
less on its institutions than on its place in the world. Professor 
Firth pronounces that; though the ideas of the book are bold and 
original, the facts are sometimes strained. Generalisation is 
a difficult art, and Seeley occasionally traced results too 
exclusively to diplomatic factors. 

Seeley's output, though slender in quantity, is of high quality. 
His writings were completely elaborated before they were given 
to the world, and he had a horror of lazy thinking, slovenly 
expression and careless scholarship. He felt a hearty contempt 
for the purveyors of the picturesque. It has been said that he 
handled facts like a lawyer, building up a case and making the 
lines of his argument converge on a single point. His conclusions 
are hammered into the mind and are impossible to misunderstand 
or forget. Though he excluded vast tracts of the life of the past 
from the purview of the historian, no one has so ardently pro- 
claimed the capacity of history to guide and influence the present. 
History possessed a meaning,- and it was the main duty of the 
historian to discover that meaning. It was the direct reference 
to the problems of the day which helped to win for the • Expan- 
sion of England ' its phenomenal success. When the Historical 
Tripos was established, he claimed a leading place in it for 
political science. ' Historical details were worth nothing to him 
but as a basis for generalisation,' wrote his friend Dr. Prothero 
after his death. ' In dealing with history he always kept 
a definite end in view — the solution of some problem, the 
establishment of some principle, which would arrest the attention 
of the student and might be of use to the statesman. Narrative 
without generalisation had no interest for him.' Politics, he 
declared, were vulgar when they were not liberalised by history, 
and history faded into mere literature when it lost sight of its 
relation to practical politics. The attempt to derive practical 
lessons from history and to build up a science of politics was 
pursued in the Conversation Classes to which many Cambridge 
men look back with gratitude. It was a lofty ambition ; but 
didactic history, however scientific in intention and stimulating 



374 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, in result, has its pitfalls. Moreover,- his emphasis on the superior 
XIX utility of the study of recent times is treason to the great truth 
that to-day is not only the child of yesterday but the heir of all 
the ages. 

IV 

Creighton,i like Seeley, was above all interested in the re- 
lations of States, the technique of diplomacy, the secrets of the 
council-chamber. Both approached their task in the cool, 
detached manner of Ranke, and both were more interested in 
action than in ideas. His apprenticeship was served at Oxford, 
where he lectured on mediae val and modern history, and wrote 
popular sketches of Rome, Simon de Mont fort and the Age of 
Elizabeth. The success of these elementary works encouraged 
him to more serious undertakings when he accepted a college 
living at Embleton. He was passionately attached to Italy, 
and had written on y£neas Sylvius and other Italian subjects. 
In 1877 he informed a friend that he was busy on what he intended 
to make the work of his life, a history of the Papacy from the 
beginning of the Great Schism to the Council of Trent. ' My 
book would be in no sense polemical or ecclesiastical. It aims 
at dealing with the larger political aspects of the time, and would 
embrace the history of Italy, its art and literature, as well as a 
survey of the whole of European history. It would fill a void 
between Milman, which becomes very scrappy towards its close, 
and Ranke 's " Popes," and my object is to combine the 
picturesqueness of the one with the broad political views of the 
other.' He approached the Papacy with a good deal of sympathy. 
' Popular Protestantism,' he wrote, ' has so grotesquely mis- 
represented facts concerning the Reformation that now one of 
the great means used by the Roman Catholics to make converts 
is to prove to anyone who will listen the falsity of their opinions 
regarding the facts of the past.' He had no theories, no philo- 
sophy of history, no wish to prove or disprove anything. His 
ambition was simply to collect materials for a judgment of 
the Reformation. Ecclesiastical history is but rarely approached 
in such a spirit, and the book realises its author's ideal of light 
without heat. 

The first two volumes, bringing the story down to the middle 
of the fifteenth century, appeared in 1882. Their learning and 

1 See Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, by his wife, 2 vols., I9°4: 
Richard Garnett in Eng. Hist. Review, April 1901 ; Gosse, Portraits and 
Sketches, 1912, 



GARDINER AND LECKY, SEELEY AND CREIGHTON 375 

impartiality were everywhere recognised, and won him the CHAP. 
Professorship of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge. Dr. XIX 
Hodgkin, looking back on his intercourse with Creighton during 
the composition of the work, declares that he raised his standard 
of the way in which history ought to be written. ' I always like,' 
he said, ' to keep close to my authorities ' ; and the volumes 
showed how literally he interpreted his duty. The discussions 
of the sources are among the most valuable parts of the work. 
The volumes suffer, indeed, from an almost austere severity of 
treatment. The intrigues of the period, the procession of Popes 
and anti-Popes, are narrated in minute detail. Were it not for the 
Hussite movement and the gallant attempts of the Councils 
to reform the Church, they might fairly be called dull, or even, 
as their author half seriously declared, very dull. It was not 
his fault that the Pontiffs, except Nicholas V and Pius II, were 
singularly lacking in personality. ' When events are tedious,' 
he wrote, ' you must be tedious.' Yet the work built up a 
reputation among scholars at home and abroad, and it gave him 
special satisfaction that his fairness was recognised at Rome. 
Acton, whom he considered the only Englishman capable of 
judging the merits of the book, spoke of his sovereign impartial- 
ity, though he challenged the favourable verdict on the Conciliar 
movement and regretted that so little attention was devoted 
to the development of ideas. He expected more opposition 
from his own camp, for his aim had been to ' clear away Pro- 
testant misconceptions about the steady growth of what they 
call an evangelical spirit.' 

Creighton's most memorable achievement was the treatment 
of the early Renaissance Popes in the third and fourth volumes. 
His love of brilliant colour and striking personalities gave the 
age of the Italian princes a special fascination. The studies 
of scholarship and culture were unreservedly praised ; but the 
handling of the Popes who made the Papacy a great Temporal 
Power found severe critics. It was not in his nature to moralise, 
to wring his hands, or to hurl thunderbolts against crowned 
sinners. ' I am busy with the Borgias,' he wrote, ' and it is like 
spending one's day in a low police court. But I don't want to 
show how the Popes lived in Rome, but how they affected 
Europe.' He refused to exhibit Roderick Borgia as a moral 
monster, and claimed for him not a few of the homelier virtues. 
' Alexander's unparalleled wickedness,' he wrote before the book 
was published, ' is a result of the general desire to find a scape- 
goat for the decay of Italy in the sixteenth century. He was 
bad enough, but not exceptionally bad.' The exceptional infamy 



376 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, attaching to him was largely due to the fact that he did not add 
XIX hypocrisy to his other vices. ' The good are not so good as they 
think themselves,' he remarked; 'the bad are not so bad as 
the good think them.' 

The new volumes provoked Acton to something like indigna- 
tion. ' He is not striving to prove a case or burrowing towards 
a conclusion, but wishes to pass through scenes of raging con- 
troversy and passion with a serene curiosity, a suspended judg- 
ment, a divided jury and a pair of white gloves.' To the Catholic 
the degradation of the Papacy was a shameful tragedy. ' It is 
the office of historical science to maintain morality as the sole 
impartial criterion of men and things, and the only one on which 
honest minds can be made to agree.' A second criticism from 
the same pen will carry more general conviction. Acton con- 
gratulated him on ' lightening his burden ' by substituting life 
and action for thought and law. It was a delicate method of 
hinting that the treatment was external and therefore superficial. 
Creighton preferred pageantry to problems, narrative to reflection. 
The weighty criticism led to a correspondence, in which Acton 
stated his views with increased emphasis. ' I cannot accept 
your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other 
men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If 
there is any presumption it is the other way, against the holders 
of power, increasing as the power increases.' Creighton's re- 
joinder protested against making history a branch of moral 
science. Men who thought heresy a crime might be accused 
of an intellectual mistake, not necessarily of a moral crime. 
' History supplies me with few heroes, and records few good 
actions ; but the actors were men like myself, sorely tempted by 
the possession of power. Who am I that I should condemn 
them ? Surely they knew not what they did.' 

The faults which Acton pointed out reappear in an intensified 
degree in the concluding volume of the work, extending from 
the accession of Leo X to the sack of Rome. Creighton was 
well fitted by his calm temperament for dealing with controver- 
sial periods, but his mind was too secular to master the problems 
of the Reformation. In the admirable words of Richard Garnett, 
' He prefers the learning of the fifteenth century to the theology 
of the sixteenth. Italians suit him better than Germans, states- 
men better than warriors, scholars better than prophets.' The 
chapters on the German Humanists and the Reuchlin controversy, 
with which the volume opens, are written with his old ardour 
for culture. As men are born Platonists or Aristotelians, so are 
they born to love Luther or Erasmus. Creighton was on the 



GARDINER AND LECKY, SEELEY AND CREIGHTON 377 

side of Erasmus. Though there are brilliant passages in the CHAP. 
volume, it did nothing to advance his fame. No real attempt XIX 
is made to explain one of the greatest events in history. He is 
silent on thought and feeling in the fifteenth century. He has 
little to say of the grievances against Rome, the indignation at 
the worldliness of the Church, the protests of the moralist, the 
preacher and the satirist. That a great change was impending 
was obvious in the fifteenth century ; but in his pages the Refor- 
mation arrives virtually unannounced. He opens his narrative 
by the curious words, ' The religious revolt, originated by Luther, 
fell like a thunderbolt from a clear sky.' He frankly rejected 
the traditional Protestant notion that it was inevitable, and 
pronounced it a misfortune for Christendom that it took the 
form of a breach of the unity of the Church. 

If the Reformation was not due to the scandals of the Curia, 
the corruption of the Church, or the sentiment of nationality, 
it seems obvious that Luther must have been a man of almost 
superhuman powers. Yet nowhere does the personality of the 
Reformer appear so small and unimpressive. To Catholics he is a 
bold bad man. To Protestants he is a bold good man. In the 
pages of Creighton he is a vacillating soul, drifting rather than 
marching into rebellion. The narrative was of service in showing 
the gradual evolution of his theory of the Church ; but that 
might have been accomplished without dwarfing his mighty figure. 
Luther was the first great man that Creighton met with in 
his history, and he failed to realise his greatness. He was partly 
conscious of his failure. ' What I have written about Luther,' he 
wrote to Henry Charles Lea, ' does not satisfy me. Kolde admires 
it, but says that he must be understood from the religious side, 
whereas I treat him chiefly from the political side.' The criticism 
of the German Professor touches the heart of the matter. 
Creighton declared that he tried to take the view of a contempor- 
ary statesman, and his brilliant monograph on Wolsey portrays 
the world in which he felt himself at home. He lacked insight 
into the life and thought of the masses and into the fiery con- 
victions of religious reformers. Yet, despite its limitations, 
the ' History of the Papacy ' is a notable book. Though there 
are no revelations — for Creighton never entered the twilight world 
of the archives — the printed sources are skilfully employed. 
His impartiality is conspicuous, his criticism always measured, 
the style clear and interesting. In dealing with men and move- 
ments with which he is in full sympathy he reaches a very high 
level of portraiture and interpretation. The weakness of the book 
lies in its indifference to the more fundamental experiences 



378 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, of the religious life. He had completed the greater part of the 
XIX fifth volume before his appointment to a bishopric in 1891. He 
had intended to reach the Council of Trent, and the ample 
treatment of the fifteenth century had been designed to form the 
vestibule to a still more detailed narrative of the century of the 
Reformation. But his new duties proved as fatal to systematic 
historical production as with Stubbs. His latest work was a 
brief Introduction to the opening volume of the Cambridge 
Modern History, in which he skilfully depicts the Renaissance 
as the beginning of the modern world. 



CHAPTER XX 

ACTON AND MAITLAND 



Acton's i descent from the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of CHAP. 
Naples during the Napoleonic era and from the ancient German -^X 
house of Dalberg secured him from his birth the entry into a 
cosmopolitan and singularly interesting circle, which was widened 
by the marriage of his mother with Lord Granville. His inability 
to enter Cambridge led him to Munich, where he lived for six 
years in the house of Dollinger, the greatest ornament of Catholic 
scholarship, who became the most potent influence in his life. 
He threw himself with extraordinary energy into the study of 
theology, and impressed all who met him with the strength and 
range of his intellect. 3 On leaving Munich he attended the 
lectures of Ranke and Bockh at Berlin, made a long tour 
through the United States, and accompanied his stepfather to 
the coronation of Alexander II. 

The contrast between the stirring intellectual life of Germany 
and the stagnant Catholicism of his native land determined 
him to introduce the leaven of modern scholarship into England. 
The publication of his correspondence during the years 1858-64 
and of the official biography of Newman enables us to follow 
his efforts. With the aid of the brilliant convert Simpson, the 

1 See Herbert Paul's memoir prefixed to Acton's Letters to Mary 
Gladstone, 1904 ; Introduction (by Figgis and Laurence) to History of 
Freedom and other Essays, 1907 ; Edinburgh Review, Ap. 1903 ; R. L. 
Poole, Eng. Hist. Review, Oct. 1902 ; Bryce, Studies in Contemporary 
Biography, 1903 ; Lady Blennerhassett in Biographisches Jahrbuch, 1905 ; 
Figgis in Diet. Nat. Biog. ; Herbert Fisher, ' Acton's Historical Work,' 
Quarterly Review, July, 1911 ; Grant Duff, Out of the Past, vol. ii., 1903: 

- See Bernhard von Meyer, Erlebnisse, vol. i. ch. 12, 1875. ' With true 
joy I recall the time when I was privileged to enjoy the society of this 
young man, already possessed of extensive knowledge and consumed with 
zeal for German scholarship.' 



3 8o HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, biographer of Campion, he used the Rambler to survey the 
XX movement of European thought and to discuss historical, 
political and philosophical problems. 1 Though he was only 
twenty-four when he began to instruct his fellow Catholics, the 
years of apprenticeship and undefined opinions were far behind. 
From his boyhood he had read omnivorously in many languages, 
copying notable passages and arranging his extracts in boxes 
and drawers. At twenty-three he began to build up the glorious 
library which was the delight of his life, and which was one day 
to find a home in Cambridge. 2 He had gained a decade while 
his contemporaries were at school, and climbed the outlook 
tower at the beginning instead of in the middle of life. It was 
an uphill fight ; for his message was not only the importance 
of learning but the sacredness of truth, the rights of conscience, 
the crime of civil and religious absolutism. He was naturally 
eager to obtain the assistance of Newman ; but the greatest of 
English Catholics was scarcely less repelled by the audacities of 
the Rambler than by the obscurantism of Manning and Ward. 
In reply to a letter criticising the treatment of Pius V Acton wrote 
a lugubrious reply. ' Public opinion does not admit the authority 
of science or the sanctity of truth for its own sake. Our aim is 
the encouragement of the true scientific spirit and the disinter- 
ested love of truth. I have nowhere seen this principle seriously 
adopted by any Catholic periodical.' When the monthly 
journal was suppressed the quarterly Home and Foreign Review 
was founded to carry on the campaign. 'There is only one 
thing you may not like,' wrote the editor to Newman on the 
appearance of the first number ; ' Paul III had a son, not a 
nephew as he is usually called. I feel very strongly that this 
ought to be gibbeted, and I cannot avoid pointing out the wilful 
lie that it involves.' By 1864 the patience of the authorities 
was exhausted. Acton bowed to authority, and suppressed the 
Review. 

The output of these six years was prodigious both in quantity 
and range. 3 The more important articles were republished 
after his death. Except for a study of James de la Cloche and a 
sharp* attack on Buckle, the essays are directly or indirectly con- 
cerned with Catholicism and its enemies. The earliest, ' Political 
Thoughts on the Church,' laments the supersession of religious 

1 See Gasquet's Introduction to Lord Acton and His Circle, 1906, and 
Wilfrid Ward's biographies of W. G. Ward and Newman. 

2 See Tedder, ' Lord Acton as a Book Collector,' Proceedings of the 
British Academy, vol. i. 

3 See the bibliography compiled for the Royal Historical Society. 



ACTON AND MAITLAND 381 

motives by political opinions, which it traces to the usurpa- CHAP, 
tion by the Protestant States of the functions of the Church. XX 
Rome was attacked by Conservatives as a political danger and 
by Liberals as the foe of liberty. ' We must be prepared to do 
battle for our religious system in every other sphere as well as 
in that of doctrine.' The Middle Ages were a time ' in which 
were laid the foundations of all the happiness that has since been 
enjoyed and of all the greatness that has been achieved by men.' 
The Christian notion of conscience demanded a corresponding 
measure of personal liberty, and the Church could not tolerate 
any government in which this right was not recognised. She 
was the irreconcilable enemy of the despotism of the State, and 
thus the guardian of liberty as well as of conscience. Absolute 
monarchy had been her greatest enemy, but rationalist democracy 
was an equal danger. The Reformation was ' the great modern 
apostasy,' for which a day of reckoning would come as it had 
come for paganism. Yet England, ' in the midst of its apostasy 
and in spite of so much guilt towards religion,' had preserved the 
Catholic spirit in her political institutions more than any other 
country. 

Acton followed the events of 1S60 in Italy with indignation, 
and wrote a pungent essay on the death of Cavour, who sought 
the greatness of the State, not the liberty of the people. His 
attack on Austria in 1859 was unpardonable, and his hostility 
to the Church a calamity. ' The incompatibility of the Pied- 
montese laws and government with the freedom of the Church is 
the real danger in the loss of the Temporal Power.' The Tem- 
poral Power was the theme of a long article a few months later on 
Dollinger's new book, 'The Church and the Churches.' Like 
his master he pronounced Protestantism to be doomed — 
' disorganised as a Church, its doctrines in a state of dissolution, 
despaired of by its divines, strong and compact only in its hostility 
to Rome.' The Primacy was essential to the Church of Christ, 
and without it the body broke up into warring atoms. The 
Reformation was a great movement against the freedom of con- 
science ; for the rejection of the Pope led straight to the divine 
right of kings, which was invented by Luther. The government 
of the Papal States was in need of reform, but there was neither 
despotism nor spiritual decay. A remarkable article on the 
' Protestant Theory of Persecution ' carries the war boldly into 
the enemy's camp. Protestantism, he repeated, had swept away 
the only authority that could temper the omnipotence of the 
State. The Reformers preached and practised the punishment 
of error by death in an age when the disappearance of unity 



382 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, had deprived it of excuse. There is not a word in condemnation 
XX f Catholic persecution ; and in an essay on Goldwin Smith's 
' Irish History ' he defended Rome against the charge of being 
a persecutor. Mediaeval persecution was justified, for the sects 
were revolutionary parties ; and Catholicism never persecuted 
those outside her fold. A long review of Hefele's life of Ximenes 
attacked the Spanish Inquisition for repressing religious thought 
and aiding absolutism, but pronounced it to have been useful 
in combating vice. Despite the militant Catholicism of the 
Rambler, Wiseman publicly attacked it for its ' absence of all 
reserve or reverence in its treatment of persons or of things 
deemed sacred, its grazing over the very edges of the most peril- 
ous abysses of error, and its habitual preference of uncatholic 
to Catholic instincts, tendencies and motives.' Acton issued a 
spirited reply in his new organ, vindicating his loyalty and his 
independence. ' Modern society has developed no security for 
freedom, no instrument of progress, no means of arriving at 
truth which we look upon with indifference or suspicion.' The 
defence failed to conciliate his critics, and the striking essay, 
' Conflicts with Rome,' published in 1864, announces the termina- 
tion of the Home and Foreign Review. ' There is no lack of 
periodicals representing science apart from religion or religion 
apart from science. The Review has attempted to exhibit the 
two in union. The principles it has upheld will not die with it, 
but will find their destined advocates and triumph in their 
appointed time.' 

Newman's letters show that it was rather Simpson than Acton 
who gave offence ; but the position of a critical individualist 
in a Church claiming divine authority was intrinsically difficult. 
Though Catholicism had not had such an advocate in England 
since the Reformation, the leaders were becoming increasingly 
suspicious of the German scholarship which Dollinger and his 
pupil represented. Newman, Manning and Ward had left the 
Church of their birth owing to its surrender to ' Liberalism,' 
and they had no mind to admit the evil spirit into the Church 
of their adoption. When Ambrose St. John visited Pius IX 
in 1869, the Pope spoke to him of those who were not Catholics 
di cuore, of whom Acton was the type.i The indefatigable pro- 
pagandist contributed leading articles to a weekly journal 
called the Chronicle, which was founded in 1867 and only lived 
a year, and then helped to reorganise the North British Review 
on the lines of Liberal Catholicism. In the latter appeared the 
massive article on the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, which 
1 Ward's Newman, vol. ii. 167. 



ACTON AND MAITLAND 383 

rebuked the attempts to dissociate the Church from respon- CHAP. 
sibility. ' Such things will cease to be written when we perceive XX 
that truth is the only merit that gives dignity and worth to 
history.' The apologist was developing into the historian. 

As the Vatican Council approached Acton joined his master 
in resisting a consummation which he believed would be equally 
disastrous to liberty and the Church. From Rome he sent to 
Dollinger full reportson whichthe ' Lettersof Quirinus ' were largely 
based. When defeated he published his ' Open Letter to a German 
Bishop ' and an article in the North British Review. The former 
contrasted the bold words of the minority in the early stages 
with their silence at the critical moment, and declared that in 
duty to their reputation they must resist to the end. The latter 
surveyed in detail the origin, problems and course of the Council, 
which might have been used for reform had not the Pope been 
captured by the Jesuits. No appeal to revelation or tradition, 
to reason or conscience, had produced any effect. In recent 
years almost every writer who really served Catholicism had fallen 
sooner or later into disgrace or suspicion. Romanism was triumph- 
ing over Catholicism. The springing of Infallibility on the Council 
was a conspiracy. The final defeat of his ideal of a tolerant 
and scholarly Catholicism threw a lasting shadow over Acton's 
life. The Church of his dreams was as far from the Ultramon- 
tanism of Pius IX and Manning as the Protestantism of Harnack 
from that of Spurgeon. Like Dollinger, he refused to join the 
Old Catholic Church ; but he was regarded with natural suspicion 
by the victors, and Manning more than once invited explanations. 
He believed that he would be excommunicated, and told Gladstone 
that the only question was when the blow would fall.i He was 
not, however, molested, and he remained throughout life a 
devout Catholic. He was relieved to discover that the tremen- 
dous power claimed and recognised in 1870 was never employed 
during his lifetime ; but his hatred of the spirit of Ultramon- 
tanism never varied. Mr. Herbert Paul compares him to Sarpi ; 
but if he cared little more for the Curia, he had a far deeper 
interest in religion than the great Venetian. His last utterance 
on behalf of his Church was the series of letters to The Times 2 in 
1874 in answer to Gladstone's attack on Vaticanism. In reply 
to the contention that Catholics could no longer be loyal owing 
to their allegiance to a foreign potentate, he maintained that 
though the Pope had long claimed the power to depose princes 

1 Manning described him as the evil genius of Gladstone ; see Purcell's 
Manning, 1895, vol. ii. 434-5 and 490-1. 

2 Nov. 9, 24, 30, Dec. 12, 



384 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. English Catholics had not acted and would not act seditiously. 
XX In his later writings confessionalism completely disappears. 

The plan of a ' History of Liberty,' written throughout 
from the original sources, had been formed early in life ; and in 
1877 he delivered two lectures to a popular audience which 
indicate the direction of his thought. ' Liberty,' he begins, ' next 
to religion, has been the motive of good deeds and the common 
pretext of crime.' By liberty he meant the assurance that every 
man should be protected in doing what he believed to be his duty 
against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and 
opinion. ' The most certain test by which we judge whether 
a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by 
minorities.' There was little liberty in Greece and Rome, for 
the individual was at the mercy of the State. The words of 
Christ, ' Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and 
unto God the things that are God's,' were the repudiation of 
absolutism and the inauguration of freedom. In the Middle 
Ages it was the resistance of the Church which prevented Europe 
from falling under a Byzantine despotism. From the conflict 
of the secular and ecclesiastical power arose civil liberty, for 
both were driven to acknowledge the sovereignty of the people. 
While the outcome of ancient politics was an absolute State 
planted on slavery, the Middle Ages witnessed the restriction of 
authority by representation and by the Church. This process 
was arrested by Machiavelli and the Reformers, who revived 
the theory of absolutism. Liberty was saved by England and 
America. The striking article of a year later on Erskine May's 
' Democracy in Europe ' covers the same ground in less popular 
form. ' Ancient democracy in its best days was never more than 
a partial and insincere solution of the problem of popular govern- 
ment.' Christianity introduced ideas that made for democracy, 
but they were not applied. Its revival was due neither to the 
Christian Church nor to the Teutonic State, but to the quarrel 
between them. After emphasising Luther's championship of 
passive obedience, he declares Lilburne among the first to 
understand the real conditions of democracy. To America is 
due its triumph and its influence in Europe. ' It was democracy 
in its highest perfection, armed and vigilant against its own 
weakness and excess.' He blames the French Revolution for 
imparting to modern democracy an implacable hatred of religion, 
and declares its theory of equality disastrous to liberty. He 
concludes by discussing federalism, proportional representation 
and other guarantees of freedom. The lesson of history is that 
the only hope of liberty lies in the division of power. 



ACTON AND MAITLAND 385 

The ' History of Liberty ' was never written nor even begun • CHAP. 
and the task, as he conceived it, was beyond human power. XX 
' Acton,' wrote Gregorovius in his diary in 1869, ' sets copyists to 
work all over the world to supply him with materials. I am afraid 
he may be swamped by their very copiousness.' l His words 
on Doliinger are only too applicable to himself. ' He would not 
write with imperfect materials, and to him the materials were 
always imperfect.' Doliinger had judged correctly when he 
said that if Acton did not write a great book before he was 
forty, he would never do so. ' Twenty years ago,' records Mr. 
Bryce in a well-known passage, ' late at night, in his library at 
Cannes, he expounded to me his views of how such a history of 
liberty might be written, and how it might be made the central 
thread of all history. He spoke for six or seven minutes only ; 
but he spoke like a man inspired, as if, from some mountain 
summit high in air, he saw beneath him the far-winding path 
of human progress from dim Cimmerian shores of pre~historic 
shadow into the fuller yet broken and fitful light of the modern 
time. The eloquence was splendid ; but greater than the 
eloquence was the penetrating vision which discerned through 
all events and in all ages the play of those moral forces, now 
creating, now destroying, always transmuting, which had moulded 
and remoulded human institutions, and had given to the human 
spirit its ceaselessly changing forms of energy. It was as if 
the whole landscape of history had been suddenly lit up by a 
burst of sunlight. I have never heard from any other lips any 
discourse like this, nor from his did I ever hear the like again.' 

The foundation of the English Historical Review in 1886 
supplied a new stimulus to production. 3 Acton had long wished 
for something corresponding to the great reviews of Sybel and 
Monod, and promised his support. An article on ' German 
Schools of History,' the most impressive he ever wrote, opened 
the first number, and was hailed by Creighton, the first editor, 
as sufficient to establish the reputation of the journal throughout 
Europe. He presents the ideas that underlay the historical 
scholarship of the century, connecting history with the move- 
ment of political, religious and economic thought throughout 
Europe. It is equally striking for its boundless learning, its 
sureness of judgment and its pregnant style, and students may 
measure their advance by their progressive ability to understand 
and appreciate this marvellous dissertation. Next in importance 
was the massive article on Doliinger, written on the death of his 

1 Roman Journals, 340, 1910. 

- See Creighton's Life, vol. i. ch. 11, 1904. 

2 C 



386 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, nonagenarian master, ' who formed his philosophy of history on 
XX the largest induction ever available to man.' The obituary notice 
of Giesebrecht, brief as it is, conveys not only a complete idea 
of the personality and achievement of the historian but of his 
position in the life of his country. Though his other contribu- 
tions were reviews, each possessed the value of an article. Those 
of Lea's ' History of the Inquisition ' and Mr. Bryce's ' American 
Commonwealth ' were worthy of the classics which they discussed ; 
while the criticisms of less important books — Flint's ' Historical 
Philosophy in France,' Creighton's volumes on the Italian 
Princes, de Broglie's study of Mabillon, Morse Stephens' 
' History of the French Revolution,' Seeley's ' Napoleon,' and 
Bright's ' Victorian Era ' — are crowded with judgments and 
ideas that give them permanent interest. His style became 
increasingly concentrated, epigrammatic and allusive. There was 
no pose of superiority ; but he leaves the impression that he 
writes from a higher level of knowledge than other men. His 
contributions form beyond question the most striking element 
in the first decade of the Review, and there is nothing like them 
in English historical literature. In the Nineteenth Century 
he reviewed the biographies of George Eliot and Lord Houghton, 
and analysed the memoirs of Talleyrand and Tocqueville on 
their appearance. More remarkable was the Introduction to 
Burd's edition of the ' Prince,' in which he traces the conscious 
or unconscious adoption of the principles of Machiavelli through 
the centuries, and pronounces him not a vanishing type but a 
constant and contemporary influence. 

Acton's appointment to the Chair of Modern History at 
Cambridge on the death of Seeley in 1895 aroused unusual 
interest. 1 Though his name was scarcely known to the general 
public he had been a conspicuous figure for nearly forty years 
in the republic of learning, he had taken a leading part 
in one of the greatest struggles of the century, he was familiar 
with the statesmen no less than the scholars of Europe, and he 
was beyond comparison the most erudite Englishman of his time. 
Half a German by birth and training, he brought an international 
atmosphere into the University. A Catholic Professor of History 
was a novelty ; but the choice was abundantly justified not 
only as a fitting tribute to a scholar of world-wide reputation 
but from the narrower standpoint of the Cambridge historical 
school. The University has never had a Professor more capable 

1 See Pollock, ' Lord Acton at Cambridge,' Independent Review, Oct. 
1904, and the Introduction (by Figgis and Laurence) to Lectures on 
Modem History, 1906, 



ACTON AND MAITLAND 387 

of inspiring his students to research and reflection or more ready CHAP, 
to enter into their life and interests. The inaugural lecture 1 xx 
struck a note which had never been heard at either University. 
In his opening paragraphs he shattered the fetters in which his 
predecessor had bound himself and his pupils. ' Politics and 
history are interwoven, but are not commensurate. Ours is 
a domain that reaches farther than affairs of State. It is 
our function to keep in view and to command the movement 
of ideas, which are not the effect but the cause of public events.' 
The first of human concerns was religion, the second was liberty ; 
and their fortunes were intertwined. Passing from the scope and 
content of history to the spirit which should govern its study 
he emphasised the sanctity of the moral code. ' I exhort you 
never to debase the moral currency, but to try others by the 
final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man 
and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has 
the power to inflict on wrong.' ' If in our uncertainty we must 
often err, it may be sometimes better to risk excess in rigour 
than in indulgence.' ' If we lower our standard in history, we 
cannot uphold it in Church and State.' The fear that the 
Professor would shield his Church disappeared when it was 
realised that the severest sentences were pronounced where 
religion should have taught men better. ' In judging men and 
things,' he had written to Creighton, 'ethics go before dogma, 
politics and nationality.' 2 He practised what he preached ; 
and he never wrote or uttered a word as Regius Professor which 
revealed him as member of one Church rather than another. 

The Regius Professor delivered two courses of lectures, 
which were published after his death. That on Modern History 
traces in broad outline the development of the world from the 
Renaissance to the eve of the French Revolution. Designed as 
it was for students reading for an examination, it naturally 
contains a great deal of familiar information ; but we feel his 
personality in the pontifical judgments with which the book 
abounds, and many things appear in a new light. Though the 
book necessarily deals with events rather than with ideas, the 
dominant theme is the advance of mankind towards liberty. 
' We have no thread through the enormous intricacy of modern 
politics except the idea of progress towards more perfect and 
assured freedom and the divine right of free men.' In a striking 

1 Its teaching was sharply challenged by H. C. Lea, ' Ethical Values in 
History,' American Historical Review, vol. ix., and Lamprecht in Deutsche 
Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenschaft, 1898. 

2 See the interesting correspondence in Creighton's Life, vol. i. ch. 13. 



388 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, phrase he declares the emancipation of conscience from authority 
XX the main content of modern history. His comments on the 
Augsburg settlement of 1555, the Edict of Nantes, the theorists 
of the English Revolution and the American War, to name a 
few passages, suggest the rich contribution of liberty to the life 
of mankind. Of the men of action William the Silent and 
Washington receive marks for good conduct ; but lor most of the 
outstanding figures among princes, from Charles V to Frederick 
the Great, he has little admiration. Religious and racial pre- 
possessions fall into their proper place when the progress of 
humanity is taken as the test and measure of progress. 

The course on the French Revolution is far more interesting 
and characteristic, and forms the best introduction to that 
stupendous movement. The Professor was dealing with the 
greatest subject in modern history and with a movement in 
which ideas and action were inextricably intertwined. No 
brief summary can convey an adequate idea of the strength, 
the eloquence and the wealth of reflection in this wonderful 
book. The opening lecture on the Heralds of Revolution is 
remarkable for the prominent position assigned to the saintly 
Fenelon, ' the first man who saw through the majestic hypocrisy 
of the Court and knew that France was on the road to ruin.' He 
believed that absolute power was poison, and that the only 
antidote was a Constitution. The philosophers who succeeded 
him continued his work by undermining authority; but none 
of them, least of all Rousseau, desired or understood political 
liberty. ' The spark that turned thought into action was supplied 
by the Declaration of Independence.' The lecture on the 
Influence of America is one of the most valuable in the volume, 
not only for the extracts from American publicists and the 
discussion of the earlier philosophy of Burke, but also for his 
judgment of the great struggle. ' Their grievance was difficult 
to substantiate and trivial in extent. But if interest was on one 
side, there was a manifest principle on the other — a principle 
so sacred and so clear as imperatively to demand the sacrifice 
of men's lives, of their families and their fortune. They 
represented liberty as a thing so divine that the existence of 
society must be staked to prevent even the least infraction 
of its sovereign right.' When Acton speaks of liberty there is 
always a ring in his voice. 

It was the combination of French theory and American 
practice that led to the events of 1789. The Cahiers gave a 
mandate for the abolition of feudalism and despotism, not for 
the establishment of a democratic republic. In contrast to 



ACTON AND MAITLAND 389 

Taine's picture of the actors, Acton declares them to have been CHAP, 
average men, with a large number above the common standard •^ x - 
both in ability and character, while Mirabeau and Sieves possessed 
genius. ' The Revolution will never be intelligently known to us 
till we discover its conformity to the common law, and recognise 
that it is not utterly singular and exceptional, that other scenes 
have been as horrible as these, and many men as bad.' The 
main responsibility for the degradation of the reform movement 
he attributes to the Court. The King began as the convinced 
advocate of reform ; but he was surrounded by evil advisers, and 
the worst of them was the Queen. Of the Declaration of Rights 
he speaks with enthusiasm. ' It is the triumphant proclamation 
of the doctrine that human obligations are not all assignable to 
contract or to interest or to force. This single page of print 
outweighs libraries and is stronger than all the armies of 
Napoleon.' Yet it had one great fault. It sacrificed liberty to 
equality, and the absolutism of the King was succeeded by the 
absolutism of the Assembly. 

Long before the Constituent had had time to grapple with 
the most urgent problems, Europe began to threaten the Revolu- 
tion. The Emigres intrigued against the new order from the 
frontier, the King and Queen from the Tuileries. The flight 
to Varennes showed France in a flash that her King had been 
saying one thing and doing another. Differing as they do in 
politics and religion, Acton and Aulard agree that it was the 
intrigues of the Court with foreign Powers that drove the Revo- 
lution into violent courses. On the other hand, the Civil 
Constitution was a fatal blunder. The Constituent Assembly 
was better than the Legislative, and the Legislative superior 
to the Convention. He laments the fall of the Monarchy, and 
condemns the September massacres, the death of the King and 
Queen and the establishment of the Terror. Yet they all had 
their causes. The reign of violence began when the danger on 
the frontier became acute, and ended when it was removed. In 
face of the Brunswick manifesto, threatening death and destruc- 
tion to the Revolution and all its works, a determined and 
despotic executive was inevitable. Thus the Girondins went 
down before the Jacobins, who were worse men and cared even 
less for liberty, but knew how to defend the fatherland. Danton 
is judged with great severity, and all that can be said for him is 
that he was not so bad as Robespierre. In a characteristic 
passage he pours scorn on the race of whitewashers. ' The strong 
man with the dagger is followed by the weaker man with the 
sponge.' Yet the Revolution, despite its horrors, was a great 



390 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, effort at human emancipation. ' The best things that are loved 
xx and sought by men are religion and liberty, not pleasure or 
prosperity, not knowledge or power. Yet the paths of both are 
stained with infinite blood.' 

A few months after Acton's appointment the University 
Press invited him to edit a comprehensive history of the modern 
world. 1 He accepted, ' because my office makes it a duty not to 
be declined, and because such an opportunity of promoting his 
own ideas for the treatment of history has seldom been given to 
any man.' In a detailed memorandum he explained his plan of 
campaign. ' We shall avoid the needless utterance of opinion 
or service of a cause. Contributors will understand that our 
Waterloo must satisfy French and English, Germans and Dutch 
alike ; that nobody can tell, without examining the list of authors, 
where the Bishop of Oxford laid down the pen, and whether 
Fairbairn or Gasquet, Liebermann or Harrison took it up.' 
After reviewing the mass of publications of new matter in every 
country, he declares that the honest student finds himself con- 
tinually deserted, retarded, misled by the classics of historical 
literature. ' Ultimate history we cannot have in this generation ; 
but we can dispose of conventional history.' He looked forward 
with special pleasure to the later volumes, which would be en- 
riched with secrets that could not be learned from books. ' Certain 
privately printed memoirs may not be absolutely inaccessible, 
and there are elderly men about town gorged with esoteric 
knowledge.' His essay on the ' Causes of the Franco -Prussian 
War,' written during his last years at Cambridge, suggests the 
wealth derived from men who had made history that was stored 
in a single brain. ' He was always hunting for the key to secret 
chambers,' remarks Mr. Bryce, ' believing that the grand stair- 
case is only for show. One was sometimes disposed to wonder 
whether he did not think too much about the backstairs ; but 
he had seen a great deal of history in the making.' The editor 
drew up a list of contributors and secured the acceptance of the 
greater number ; but in the spring of 1901 he was struck down 
by illness and compelled to resign his task. He died in 1902, 
four months before the appearance of the first volume. The 
introductory chapter in which he intended to assess the legacy of 
the Middle Ages was never written. Though it was carried out 
with admirable loyalty to his plan and is beyond comparison the 
best survey of the modern world in any language, his death was 
an irreparable blow to the enterprise. 

1 See The Cambridge Modern History, an Account of its Origin, 
Authorship and Production, 1907. 



ACTON AND MAITLAND 391 

No Englishman of the nineteenth century, not Coleridge, nor CHAP. 
Sir William Hamilton, nor Macaulay, nor Whewell, nor Mark XX 
Pattison, came so near mastering the whole range of human 
knowledge. Henry Sidgwick used to say that however much 
you knew about anything Acton was certain to know more. 
De Laveleye recorded his astonishment at finding on the table of 
his host ' all the new books on all subjects, read and annotated.' 
Mr. Tollemache tells us how Gladstone used to dismiss abstruse 
points that arose in conversation with the remark ' We must 
ask Lord Acton.' To boundless knowledge of books he added an 
unrivalled knowledge of men. He had met almost everyone 
who had played any part in politics and scholarship in Europe 
and America for half a century. In early life he sat in the House 
of Commons, in later life in the House of Lords. Lord Morley 
records that Gladstone could never have enough of his company, 
and the 'Letters to Mary Gladstone ' reveal the affectionate admira- 
tion of the scholar for the statesman. 1 A member of Grillion's 
and The Club he knew the best of English society. Abroad his 
company was sought by men like Renan and Taine, Mommsen and 
Helmholtz no less than by Dollinger and Dupanloup. In politics 
the same catholicity prevailed, and he would dine one evening with 
Thiers and the next with the Due de Broglie. He was closely 
connected with the German Royal House, and counted the Em- 
press Frederick among his intimate friends. ' To be with Acton 
was like being with the cultivated mind of Europe. In the deep 
tones of his voice there seemed to sound the accents of history.' 

He believed that historical study was not merely the basis 
of all real insight into the present but a school of virtue and a 
guide to life. ' The great achievement of history is to develop 
and perfect and arm conscience.' It was above all a spiritual 
process, a record of the formation and operation of ideas and 
ideals. Liberty was the sign and the prize and the motive in the 
onward and upward advance of the race. ' We all know some 
twenty or thirty predominant currents of thought or attitudes of 
mind which jointly weave the web of human history. All these 
a serious man ought to understand, in whatever weakness and 
strength they possess, in their causes and effects and relations. 
The majority of them are either religious or substitutes for 
religion.' He drew up a list of a hundred books for a young man 
' whose education is finished and who knows common things.' 2 

1 See Mary Drew, ' Lord Acton's Legacy to Liberals,' The Optimist, 
Jan. 1908. 

2 See Clement Shorter, ' Lord Acton's Hundred Best Books, ' Pall 
Mall Magazine, July, 1905. 



392 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. Its object was ' to perfect his mind, and open windows in every 
XX direction, to raise him to the level of his age so that he may know 
the forces that have made our world what it is and still reign over 
it, to guard against surprises and the constant sources of error 
within, to supply him with the strongest stimulants and the surest 
guides, to give force and fullness and clearness and sincerity and 
independence and elevation and generosity and serenity to his 
mind, that he may know the method and law of the process by 
which error is conquered and truth is won, that he may learn 
to master what he rejects as fully as what he adopts, that he may 
understand the origin as well as the strength and the vitality of 
systems and the better motive of men who are wrong, to steel 
him against the charm of literary beauty and talent, so that each 
book may be a beginning of a new life.' The list ranges over 
the infinite spaces of human knowledge and reveals the man who 
took all knowledge for his province. 

The historian was not only the interpreter of human evolution 
but the guardian of morality. ' The inflexible integrity of the 
moral code,' he declared, ' is to me the secret of the authority, 
the dignity and the utility of history.' He believed that at any 
rate since the coming of Christianity men knew as well as they 
know to-day what was right and what was wrong. ' Our judgment 
of men and. parties,' he wrote in his review of Morse Stephens, 
' is determined by the lowest point they touch. Murder, as the 
low- water mark, is invaluable as our basis of measurement. 
If we have no scientific zero to start from, it is idle to censure 
corruption, mendacity or treason, and morality and history go 
asunder.' He detested alike the superman and his votaries. 
' Excepting Froude,' he wrote to Mary Gladstone on the death of 
Carlyle, ' I think him the most detestable of historians.' The 
series of aphorisms containing his advice to historians breathes 
an austerity which would have satisfied Sismondi and Schlosser. 
' Judge not according to the orthodox standard of a system 
religious, philosophical, political, but according as things promote 
or fail to promote the delicacy, integrity and authority of con- 
science.' ' The greatest sin is homicide. The accomplice is no better 
than the assassin, and the theorist is worse.' ' Murder may be 
done by legal means, by plausible and profitable war, by calumny, 
as well as by dose or dagger.' History taught the student to 
seek and tell the whole truth, to insist on evidence, to suspect 
equivocation, to allow for bias. The historian was a judge, 
overawed neither by worldly greatness, success or flattery, a 
corrector of injustice, an avenger of innocence. He was dis- 
mayed at the coolness of his old master. ' Dollinger,' he wrote 



ACTON AND MAITLAND 393 

in 1879, ' looks for the root of differences in speculative systems, CHAP, 
in defect of knowledge, in everything but moral causes ; and X X 
in this I am divided from him by a gulf that is almost too deep 
for sympathy. He refuses to see all the evil there is in man.' 
This stubborn refusal to recognise that the moral atmosphere had 
changed like everything else was ultimately modified. ' During 
what was almost our last conversation,' writes his son, 1 ' he 
solemnly adjured me not to rash-judge others as he had done, 
but to take care to make allowance for human weakness.' It 
was a fitting close to a life devoted to the pursuit of truth that 
he should be learning to the end. 



II 

The most brilliant and original of English institutional 
historians prepared himself for his life work by the study of 
philosophy and the practice of law. An article on the reform 
of English Real Property Law, published in 1879, revealing a 
knowledge of the work of Brunner and other foreign jurists, 
attracted the attention of Sir Frederick Pollock and led to the 
beginning of an historic friendship. ' I was a lawyer,' wrote Sir 
Frederick after the death of his friend, ' who had found it im- 
possible to understand English law without much more historical 
criticism than was usual in text -books.' He found in Maitland 2 
a kindred mind, equally interested in past and present. In 1884 
a second notable friendship began when he met Dr. Vinogradoff 
at Oxford. ' That day determined the rest of my life.' Under 
the impulse of the conversation he paid his first visit to the 
Record Office. The result was his book, 'Pleas of the Crown for 
Gloster, ' his native county. In the same year he was appointed 
Reader in the History of English Law at Cambridge, and gave up 
his work as a conveyancer. His second venture owed its origin 
still more directly to the Russian scholar, who described in the 
Athenceum a manuscript in the British Museum containing 
hundreds of cases of Henry III, apparently compiled by or for 
Bracton, annotated by him, and used in the construction of his 
famous treatise. Maitland's studies confirmed the hypothesis 

1 Letter to The Times, Oct. 30, 1906. 

2 See Fisher, F. W. Maitland, 1910 ; A. L. Smith, Maitland, Tivo 
Lectures, 1908 ; Sir F. Pollock, Quarterly Review, April 1907 ; Vino- 
gradoff, Eng. Hist. Review, April 1907 ; Selden Society, vol. xxii., 1907 ; 
Cambridge University Reporter, July 22, 1907. For foreign appreciations 
see Bemont, Revue Historique, vol. xciii., and Law Quarterly Review, 
April 1907. 



394 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, of his friend, and in 1887 ' Bracton's Note-book ' appeared. 
xx Brilliantly edited, the cases threw light on many aspects of social 
life as well as on the legal conceptions and practices of the time. 
' Bracton's Note-book ' led to his appointment as Downing Pro- 
fessor of the Laws of England in the following year. He entitled 
his inaugural lecture ' Why the history of law is not written,' 
and answered his own question by pointing out its traditional 
isolation from every other study. Our records were unique 
both in mass and continuity, and they contained undreamed 
of treasures. ' Legal documents are the best, often the only 
evidence we have for social and economic history, for the history 
of morality, for the history of practical religion. There are 
large and fertile tracts of history which the historian has to 
avoid because they are too legal for him.' Law must be regarded 
as part of the national life, and the ideas of which it was the 
expression must be recovered. The average historian possessed 
no detailed knowledge of law, while the average lawyer's mind 
was profoundly unhistorical. To bridge the gulf he undertook 
the largest task of his life. 

The ' History of English Law,' published in 1895, though 
described as the work of Pollock and Maitland, was mainly 
written by the latter. The two hundred pages of the introductory 
sketch form a precious contribution to English history. Anglo- 
Saxon law was pronounced to be almost purely Germanic. If 
Celtic custom survived the Teutonic conquest it could not be 
traced. There was also no real evidence that Roman institutions 
outlived the invasions or contributed to the formation of our 
laws. ' Within the sphere of law everything that is Roman or 
Romanised can be accounted for by late importation. Whatever 
is Roman in the early Anglo-Saxon documents is ecclesiastical. 
In the later reigns some Roman forms and phrases filtered in from 
France. It was not till the Norman Conquest that Roman 
elements, embedded in the Frankish system of government 
which was copied by the Norman Dukes, reached England in any 
quantity. It was not till the middle of the twelfth century that 
the tide began to flow in flood from the revived study of Jus- 
tinian at Bologna ; and a century later the tide began to ebb.' 
Since Edward I legal life has been continuous. Our law was 
never obliterated by a wholesale importation of Roman elements,- 
as in Germany. The thirteenth century, the classic period of 
French and German law, had been thoroughly explored by 
Continental scholars. European law could only be fully under- 
stood when each system had been carefully studied. ' We must 
know in isolation the things that are to be compared before we 



ACTON AND MAITLAND 395 

compare them. A small share in this preliminary labour we have CHAP, 
tried to take.' While virtually confining themselves to the history XX 
of law the authors occasionally discuss a constitutional problem. 
' We think that those who have endeavoured to explore the 
private law of the Middle Ages may occasionally see even in 
political events some clue which escapes eyes that are trained 
to look only or chiefly at public affairs.' In like manner incur- 
sions are made into the sphere of ecclesiastical law, while leaving 
on one side the constitution of the Church. The greater part 
of the two massive volumes is devoted to an analysis of Angevin 
law, the manifold varieties of tenure, the social classes, the 
different jurisdictions, contract and inheritance, marriage law, 
criminal law, procedure. Though parts of this encyclopaedic 
survey are necessarily technical, it is enlivened by an alert 
style, a vivid interest in human nature and constant glimpses 
at the wider national life. 

It was the original intention of the authors to supplement 
their survey of Angevin law by a study of Domesday. ' Our one 
hope of coercing Domesday Book to deliver up its hoarded secrets, 
our one hope of making an Anglo-Saxon land-book mean some- 
thing definite, lies in an effort to understand the law of the 
Angevin time.' The treatment of ' that enigmatical record ' was 
finally held over, and ' Domesday Book and Beyond ' appeared 
a year later, bearing the name of Maitland alone. The problem 
was far more difficult than the reconstruction of Angevin law ; 
but his attempt is the most successful effort yet made to solve 
it. Seebohm's ' English Village Community,' with its realistic 
picture of mediaeval husbandry, its massive scholarship and its 
skilful marshalling of the evidence for servile origins, had pro- 
duced a deep impression on its publication in 1883. Starting 
from the familiar manorial system of the later Middle Ages he 
traced its main features back by slow stages through Domesday 
and the Anglo-Saxon centuries to the Roman occupation. The 
Roman villa, he concluded, was the ancestor of the manor, the 
village community a Latin not a Teutonic creation. The theory 
of the mark collapsed in a moment. For a time it seemed as if 
his charge had swept the Germanists from the field. Yet the 
new theory was scarcely more watertight than the old. The 
chain of evidence, which looked so complete, contained yawning 
gaps. Facts of equal importance and of a wholly different 
orientation were overlooked. Closely resembling Fustel de 
Coulanges in his habits of mind not less than in his conclusions, 
he possessed a rare power of working in high relief. Vinogradoff's 
classical work on ' Villainage,' described by Maitland as by far 



396 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, the greatest achievement in English legal history, soon proved 
xx that the social structure was far less simple than Seebohm 
believed. Where the English scholar found a single dominating 
system descending unbroken from Roman times, the Russian 
discovered a number of types, a complex of legal and social 
relationships, varying both with the century and the locality. 
While Vinogradoff's hostility to the hypothesis of servile origins 
was based chiefly on post-Domesday evidence, Maitland's 
rested on his study of Domesday itself. His conclusion is that 
the manor and the seigneurial element were not the outcome of 
the Roman villa, that free peasants become numerous as we go 
further back, that free villages existed, that England was still 
only partially manorialised at the Norman Conquest, and that 
no real manorial system existed till the twelfth century. The 
manors varied greatly in character, freeholders were numerous, 
and there were many grades of freedom. We begin with village 
communities, Germanic in origin, of landowning ceorls and their 
slaves. This free class was depressed by the growth of seigneurial 
justice and feudalism. The free village community was agrarian, 
not political. It lacked an assembly and court and was unrecog- 
nised by law. The treatise, which discusses subjects of great 
difficulty with unusual lightness of touch, definitely overthrew 
the conception of a homogeneous servile manorial England. 

A second monograph followed a year later. The Ford 
Lectures on ' Township and Borough,' though a far less ambitious 
work, grappled with the problem of the origins and privileges of 
towns in the light of the records of Oxford and Cambridge. 
Here, again, his task is to protest against over-simplification. 
He inclines to Keutgen's theory that the borough originated in 
the county fortress. The township, with market, court and 
rampart, became a borough or privileged town. After the 
Norman Conquest many towns asked for and obtained similar 
privileges. But he was well aware that no hypothesis explained 
every case. Cambridge, for instance, had no lord but the King. 
The book embraces a discussion of the corporate idea, a con- 
ception in which Maitland delighted as a blend of metaphysics, 
law and history. Gierke had shown the immense place held by 
corporations in the life of the Middle Ages. The Trust or 
Fellowship was a living organism, a real person, neither the 
creature of the State nor a fiction. This conception was explained 
and elaborated in 1900 in the brilliant Introduction to his trans- 
lation of Gierke's chapter on the theory of corporations. 

A third monograph was of more general significance. The 
' History of English Law ' had briefly sketched the legal position 



ACTON AND MAITLAND 397 

of the clergy and discussed the ecclesiastical offences of heresy CHAP, 
and sorcery ; but no attempt was made to study Canon Law. XX 
When Maitland began to work in this field the greatest and 
indeed the only authority was Stubbs, who had lectured on it at 
Oxford and compiled a memorandum for the Royal Commission 
on Ecclesiastical Courts. From Stubbs' view that it had no 
binding force in the English Church till ratified by that Church 
Maitland was converted by his study of the ' Provinciale ' of 
Lyndwood, an official of the Archbishop of Canterbury, compiled 
in 1430. Other text-books pointed in the same direction, and 
his book proved that England was as much subject to the Canon 
Law as any other country. The tradition that England was 
largely independent of Rome and that the Reformation effected 
no great change disappeared. The book created considerable 
excitement and even resentment ; but the conclusions of Maitland, 
who wrote with an impartiality only possible to a man who was 
neither Anglican nor Catholic, have held their ground. Mr. 
Ogle's recent attempt to prove that the Canon Law was respected 
but not binding has aroused interest without carrying conviction. 
The detachment from confessional ties was of no less service 
when he undertook to describe the Elizabethan Settlement and 
the Scotch Reformation for the ' Cambridge Modern History.' 
Though he had hitherto devoted little attention to the sixteenth 
century he rapidly grasped the nature of the problems he had to 
solve. In a single brief chapter he throws a flood of light on the 
Elizabethan Settlement, his mind, trained to seize and analyse 
conceptions half legal half political, piercing to the heart of the 
Reformation compromise. 

While thus busily engaged on narrative and investigation he 
devoted much time and thought to the Selden Society, which he 
had founded in 1887. Of the twenty-one volumes published 
during his life he edited no less than eight. The first volume set 
the standard for its successors. The Introduction to the ' Select 
Pleas of the Crown ' explained the differentiation of the branches 
of the Royal Court during the first half of the thirteenth century. 
The ' Select Pleas of Manorial Courts ' traced the decline of 
private jurisdiction. ' Bracton and Azo ' measured Bracton's 
debt to Roman law and Italian learning, on which Maine had 
gone astray. While special topics were illuminated by the 
publications of the Selden Society, he aroused his countrymen 
to the importance of a vast and almost totally neglected depart- 
ment of materials for a knowledge of English law. ' Some 
day,' he declared, ' it will seem wonderful that men once thought 
they could write the history of mediaeval England without using 



398 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, the Year-books.' It was because the Year-books had not been 
xx explored that the ' History of English Law ' was not continued. 
He threw himself into the study with zest, and rejoiced to 
discover how much light they shed on every branch of law and 
administration. He began with the reign of Edward II, and 
completed three volumes. He had no difficulty in exhibiting 
the unique value of what he described as the earliest ' debates ' 
in Europe. His translation of the French text is a remarkable 
achievement in philology, involving a reconstruction of the 
Anglo-French legal language. He was engaged on this abstruse 
task during the months of illness before he died. 

Maitland's death at the age of fifty-six was an irreparable 
blow to scholarship. In twenty years he had laid the foundations 
of a history of English law and had mapped sections of it in 
considerable detail. He had inspired his pupils and fellow- 
workers, among them Mary Bateson, with a boundless devotion. 
His work and worth were fully recognised. Vinogradoff declared 
him a genius. Acton pronounced him the ablest historian in 
England, while Stubbs and Gardiner were still living. Dicey 
placed him beside Blackstone and Maine. In Germany his work 
was diligently studied. Liebermann declared that he had 
turned the dust of the archives into gold, Brunner that he had 
brought England out of isolation and plunged her into the 
mid -stream of European thought. Gierke found in him an 
interpreter of his own ideas and a fellow-worker in the study of 
corporations. Similar tributes came from the historians and 
jurists of France and America. The cause of this universal 
admiration must be sought in his possession of qualities rarely 
found in combination. ' No one since Gibbon,' writes Mr. A. L. 
Smith, ' so combined the scientific and the literary, the analyst 
and the artist, the Stubbs and the Froude.' He was both 
brilliant and exact, imaginative and industrious. His technique 
was faultless. He possessed a rare insight into the conceptions 
of which law and custom were the expression. By discovering 
the human interest behind procedure and parchments he related 
law to life. He interpreted history in the widest manner. 
' What men have done and said, above all what they have thought 
— that is history.' Law could only be studied in relation to the 
broad current of national development. The history of law 
was the history of ideas, not as abstractions but as forces acting 
through living men. The bright, graceful style reflects his alert 
and vivacious spirit. He was always ready with a modern parallel 
to visualise a conception or interpret a practice. The chapter 
on the Elizabethan Settlement shows that he might have been 



ACTON AND MAITLAND 399 

as successful in narrative as he was in the interpretation of CHAP. 
institutions and ideas. His early lectures on the English Con- XX 
stitution sparkle with wit and gaiety. His Rede lecture on 
' English Law and the Renaissance ' showed in a few broad strokes 
how England kept her own law while Roman law was effecting 
an entry in Germany and Scotland. The immense rapidity 
with which he worked left no rough edges, and he touched 
nothing which he did not adorn. 

Ill 

It is impossible to do more than glance at the labours of 
many other scholars. No detailed survey of the fortunes of 
the race by a single hand has been attempted since Green ; 
but in his old age Goldwin Smith issued a commentary filled 
with incisive judgments on men and affairs. If a complete record 
is now required it must be sought in the excellent co-operative 
works edited by Dr. Hunt and Professor Oman. A wider circle 
has been reached by the ' Twelve English Statesmen,' who 
roughly cover the centuries from the Conqueror to Peel. The 
most resolute attempt to narrate our mediaeval history has been 
made by Sir James Ramsay, whose painstaking volumes extend 
to the coming of the Tudors. Making no claim to originality and 
lacking literary charm, his work derives value from its careful 
study of the sources. Round has thrown light on the troubled 
reign of Stephen. Miss Norgate has followed up her substantial 
volumes on the Angevins, undertaken at the suggestion of 
Green, by studies of John and the early years of Henry III. No 
chapter of later mediaeval history has been explored with such 
thoroughness or related with such detail as the reign of Henry IV 
by Wylie. Gairdner threw light on every part of the fifteenth 
century. Brewer collected his incomparable prefaces to the 
State Papers of Henry VIII into the massive volumes which 
carried the story of the reign to the fall of Wolsey and first 
revealed his greatness. Professor Pollard has covered the 
sixteenth century in a series of striking monographs. Spedding 
dedicated his life to collecting the writings and defending the 
fame of Bacon. Masson used Milton as a peg on which to hang 
an encyclopaedic survey of his times. By his editions of the 
Clarke Papers, Ludlow's Memoirs and many other sources, old 
and new, by his contributions to the ' Dictionary of National 
Biography,' by his monographs on Cromwell and Cromwell's 
Army, and by his continuation of Gardiner's narrative, Professor 
Firth has lit up every corner of the middle decades of the 



400 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, seventeenth century. The era of the Restoration has been illumin- 
XX ated by Christie's ' Life of Shaftesbury,' and Miss Foxcroft's 
exhaustive study of Halifax. 

The leading statesmen of the eighteenth century are gradually 
finding biographers. Sichel has composed a spirited apologia for 
Bolingbroke, Lord Rosebery has described the early life of 
Chatham from new sources, Lord Fitzmaurice has vindicated 
his ancestor Shelburne. After a sparkling sketch of the early 
life of Fox, Sir George Trevelyan has returned to his hero at 
the close of his life, expanding the narrative into a history of 
the American War. Lord Morley's volumes on Burke have won a 
place among the classics of English political literature. Holland 
Rose's full-length portrait of Pitt has superseded the compilation 
of Lord Stanhope. Fortescue has related the fortunes of the 
British Army during the Great War with infinite detail and a 
sovereign contempt for political reputations. By his biographies 
of Perceval and Lord John Russell and his English History 
from 1815 to 1880 Spencer Walpole spanned the nineteenth 
century in a long array of volumes written in the spirit of a 
moderate Whig. The later decades of the Victorian era have 
been sketched by Herbert Paul. The official biographies of 
Peel and Cobden, Gladstone and Disraeli, Granvilie and the 
Duke of Devonshire, Randolph Churchill and Goschen have 
continued the process begun by the Greville Memoirs of lifting 
the veil from the motives and plans of Victorian statesmen. The 
transition between the England of the eighteenth and the 
nineteenth centuries has been lit up by the writings of Mr. and 
Mrs. Webb and by Graham Wallas' biography of Francis Place. 
Detailed narratives of Scottish history have been compiled by 
Burton, Andrew Lang and Hume Brown. Irish history is 
still to a large extent a battle-field. Mrs. Green has sharply 
challenged the English conception of mediaeval Ireland as a 
land of chaos and savagery. Bagwell has told the story of the 
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from the standpoint of the 
ruling race. The tragic death of Litton Falkiner removed the 
best equipped scholar in the field of modern Irish history since 
Lecky. 

Among works produced by British scholars in the sphere of 
foreign history Bryce's ' Holy Roman Empire ' occupies the first 
place. Written half a century ago it has been repeatedly revised, 
and has taught countless students all over the world to under- 
stand not only the history but the theory of mediaeval politics. 
Hodgkin's 'Italy and her Invaders' has won a deserved popularity 
by its narrative power and the romantic interest of its theme. 



ACTON AND MAITLAND 401 

The English Dahn has brought to life the crowded centuries that CHAP, 
lie between Alaric and Charles the Great, and no volumes in xx 
English historical literature are more fascinating than these which 
relate the story of the Gothic Kingdom of Theodoric and its 
destruction by the armies of Justinian. If the book adds little 
to knowledge and sometimes neglects foreign scholarship, it is 
none the less a notable achievement, and the author's intimate 
acquaintance with the scene of his drama lends it unusual fresh- 
ness. Less popular but not less valuable are Howorth's ' History 
of the Mongols,' Armstrong's ; Life of Charles V,' Martin Hume's 
voluminous writings on Spain, and Ward's studies of the Thirty 
Years' War and the Hanoverian Electorate. Sir William Hunter 
devoted his life to the history of India, while Doyle and Payne 
investigated the colonisation of America. Holland Rose has 
based the best English life of Napoleon on prolonged research 
in the Record Office, and Herbert Fisher has studied the civil 
side of the Imperial administration in Germany. Professor 
Oman has retold the story of the Peninsula War, correcting the 
prejudices and supplementing the sources of Napier. Kinglake's 
spirited '■ History of the Crimean War ' is now almost forgotten. 
Fyffe wrote a survey, at once popular and scientific, of European 
history from the French Revolution to the Congress of Berlin. 
Among recent works George Trevelyan's volumes on Garibaldi 
have won an enthusiastic welcome by their brilliant style and 
patient research. 



2 d 



CHAPTER XXI 

THE UNITED STATES 



CHAP; The writing of history in America 1 begins with the memoirs 
XXI of the Pilgrim Fathers and the ' Magnalia ' of Cotton Mather. 
The first real historical scholar was the Boston Minister Prince, 
who in the early half of the eighteenth century compiled an 
accurate and informing history of New England ; but as there 
was no public for such a work, it was not continued beyond 1630. 
A generation later Hutchinson, the Tory Governor of Massachu- 
setts, traced the fortunes of the colony to the outbreak of the 
War of Independence. After the great conflict some good 
histories of separate States were produced, and in 1805 the 
' Annals of America ' were compiled by Abdiel Holmes, father of 
the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. The Massachusetts 
Historical Society was founded in 1791, that of New York in 
1811. Biographies of the heroes of the war began to appear, 
chief among them Marshall's ' Life of Washington.' The work 
of the Chief Justice derived value from personal knowledge 
and from the assistance given him by the family ; but it was 
strongly biassed, and Jefferson complained of the treatment 
of his party. More popular and more eloquent was Wirt's ' Life 
of Patrick Henry,' and the glowing picture of the famous Vir- 
ginian orator continued to be admired long after its weakness in 
fact and judgment had been exposed. 

The serious documentary study of American history begins 
with Jared Sparks, 2 whose first task was to collect the writings 
of Washington. The letters already published were scattered 
in many books, and the great mass of papers had never seen the 
light. At first the family, who were meditating the publication 

1 See J. F. Jameson's four lectures, History of Historical Writing in 
America, 1891. 

2 See H. B. Adams' massive Life of Jared Sparks, 2 vols., 1893. 



THE UNITED STATES 403 

of a selection of the private papers, refused him access to the CHAP. 
treasures of Mount Vernon ; but on the advice of Marshall they XXI 
ultimately yielded. In 1828 Sparks visited the archives of London 
and Paris. The work, which appeared between 1834 an d x ^3^ 
in twelve volumes, not only revealed the character and activity 
of the founder of the Republic, but offered the first detailed 
account of the critical period of American history. Its import- 
ance was at once recognised. Guizot supervised an abridged 
French translation and prefixed an illuminating sketch of the 
hero, while Raumer prepared a German edition. While Sparks' 
industry was everywhere recognised, the performance of his 
editorial duties did not escape criticism. He was accused by 
Lord Mahon of suppressing passages reflecting on American 
officers, and by others of altering and polishing the letters. 
Sparks' rejoinder was complete. He informed Lord Mahon 
that if he omitted certain letters it was only because their 
contents were reproduced in those which he published. To his 
other critics he retorted that, as Washington left several drafts 
of many documents and in his old age had revised many of his 
earlier letters, he felt it his duty to print them in the form they 
finally assumed. His own share in the alteration of the text had 
been confined to the correction of obvious mistakes of the 
copyist. If Sparks was not an ideal editor and was ill-advised 
in preferring the later to the earlier draft, his conscientiousness 
is beyond cavil. Though the most important of his works, the 
' Washington ' was only one of a long series. At the instance 
of the Government he published twelve volumes of documents 
illustrating the diplomatic history of the Revolution, and 
collected the writings of Franklin and. Gouverneur Morris. The 
' Library of American Biography,' containing sixty lives, several 
of them from his own pen, covered the whole range of American 
history. Sparks was also a pioneer in another field. His 
appointment to a chair at Harvard in 1839 marks the first 
recognition of historical teaching in the Universities, and long 
before the end of his life he came to be regarded as the Nestor 
of American historians. Though in no wise a commanding figure, 
he ranks among the unselfish workers who facilitate the task of 
their more gifted successors. 

American history came of age with Bancroft, 1 who possesses 
the best claim to the title of the national historian. The young 
graduate of Harvard came to Europe in the quiet years following 
the Great War, heard Hegel and Schleiermacher, Savigny and 

1 See Mrs. Howe, Life and Letters of George Bancroft, 2 vols., I9°8, and 
his Literary and Historical Miscellanies, 1855. 



404 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. Bockh, and. visited Goethe. Among historians he was most 
XXI influenced by Heeren, some of whose writings he translated after 
his return. Though a native of Massachusetts he was a Jeffer- 
sonian Democrat. ' The popular voice,' he declared in a Fourth 
of July oration in 1826, ' is all powerful with us ; this is our oracle ; 
this, we acknowledge, is the voice of God.' His address on 
' The Office of the People in Art, Government and Religion,' 
delivered in 1835, is another pgean to the crowd. ' True political 
science venerates the masses. Listen reverently to the voice of 
lowly humanity.' With this philosophy he entered on the com- 
position of a history of America, the first volume of which 
appeared in 1834. ' The spirit of the colonies demanded freedom 
from the beginning. The United States have the precedence in 
the practice and defence of the equal rights of man.' There was 
no army and no debt. Religion was free. Intelligence was 
diffused with unparalleled universality. There is not a shadow 
in the picture, and there is no mention of slavery. We breathe 
the buoyant atmosphere of the age of Jackson. 

The centuries which led up to this state of perfection naturally 
claim their share of the credit. The first volume narrates the 
early voyages and settlements, and concludes with a Character 
of Puritanism. Its only fault was intolerance ; and this was 
1 defensive and temporary. The Pilgrim Fathers made no attempt 
to convert others, and only defended their polity against attack. 
' It was no more than a train of mists hanging over a fine river.' 
Their laws were mild except in regard to the lapses of married 
women. Americans could look back with pride to a golden age. 
/ The volume was naturally hailed with delight. Bancroft uttered 
, the thoughts of Americans about themselves, and shared the 
; uncritical complacency and exuberant confidence of a sanguine 
time. It is impossible not to be touched by his faith in popular 
government and the American constitution. The work also 
aroused interest in the Old World. ' It is one of my pleasantest 
thoughts,' wrote the aged, Heeren from Gottingen, ' that I have 
helped somewhat in training the historian of the United States.' 
The second and third volumes, completing the colonisation of 
America, are written in the same strain of loud-tongued eulogy. 
Roger WiUiams is glorified as the foe of coercion in matters of 
conscience. George Fox and the Quakers are drawn with a 
loving hand, and the reputation of Penn is vigorously defended. 
Bancroft loathed every form of ecclesiastical domination, and 
proudly declares that priestcraft did not emigrate from the old 
world. The epidemic of witch-hunting is related with regret, 
but the reader is reminded that it did not last long. ' The 



THE UNITED STATES 405 

selfishness of evil defeats itself, and God rules in the affairs CHAP, 
of men/ In his ' Oration on the Progress of Mankind,' delivered XXI 
in 1854, l ie declares that progress is inevitable, guaranteed by 
God's dwelling with humanity. ' Providence never disowns 
the race. No tramp of a despot's foot ever trod out one idea. 
The world cannot retrograde.' 

In thanking the author for a copy of his second volume in 
1838 Carlyle wrote : ' Parts remind me of Johannes Muller's 
" Switzerland," one of our bravest books. But your theoretic 
matter gratifies me much less ; you are too didactic.' Carlyle 
was hardly the man to complain of didactic history ; yet the 
criticism was well founded. The philosophy of the book is 
childish, and the qualities which won success two generations ago 
are precisely those which are most offensive to modern taste. 
Yet it possessed solid worth, and its value increased as it ad- 
vanced. Americans were proud to aid the national historian with 
their recollections and family papers. He explored the archives 
of the Foreign Office at Berlin. Pascual de Gayangos helped him 
with the Spanish archives, while friends and agents worked for 
him at the Hague, Paris and Vienna. After an interval of 
twelve years spent in political life and at the London Embassy, 
he issued the fourth volume in 1852. While three volumes 
carried the story down to 1748, seven were devoted to the quarrel 
with England and the establishment of independence. He has 
no doubts as to the justification of American action, and speaks 
with extreme severity of British policy. ' The penal Acts of 
1774/ he declares, ' dissolved the moral connection of the two 
countries. Great Britain made war on human freedom. Liberty 
in Europe and in England itself was threatened. In taking up 
arms the colonies struck a blow for the progress of the whole 
of mankind.' England should have offered independence, 
as her offspring was- of age. It was a cruel and unnatural 
war ; yet it was followed by blessings for both countries. 
With the peace England gave up for ever her evil policy. 
America, for her part, distinguished between the British Govern- 
ment and the people. Respect and affection remained for 
the parent land. A nation was born without social upheaval. 
The Declaration of Independence, the immortal work of 
Jefferson, gave utterance to the eternal principles of justice and 
righteousness. 

The narrative of the conflict with England suffers from the 

usual faults of patriotic history. His picture of the colonists as 

Jired with a holy resolution to defend their liberties is a dream. 

It was left to younger writers to show how little enthusiasm 



406 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, there was for the struggle, how common were petty jealousies, 
XXI how nearly the cause was wrecked. The Loyalists were not 
traitors but representatives of a widely spread conviction. In 
another field the help of France is not sufficiently recognised, 
while the role of the German volunteers is exalted. His atten- 
tion is too much confined to New England. The later volumes 
led to sharp controversy. Descendants of men who played a 
leading part in the war published pamphlets to expose the 
injustice to their ancestors. Though Bancroft made vigorous 
replies, not a few of the criticisms were just. The work is discur- * 
sive, rhetorical, sententious. As an introduction to the narrative 
of German assistance he goes back to the V olker wander ung. 
Pages of trite reflection interrupt the narrative. Carlyle rather 
brutally told him that he went too much into the origin of things 
generally known. The work, though not finished till 1874, 
never ceased to bear the marks of its origin. Jackson remained 
the statesman of his heart. ' Do you know what I say about you 
to my classes ? ' asked Ranke when Bancroft was Minister at 
Berlin. ' I tell them that your history is the best book ever 
written from the democratic point of view.' He winced a little 
at the criticism dressed up as a compliment, and remarked that 
if there was democracy in his pages it was due to the subject, not 
to the historian. Despite these faults of judgment and execu- 
tion the book was a notable achievement. It was the first detailed 
and connected account of the history of the American colonies. 
It contained an immense mass of original material, drawn from 
the public and private archives of both hemispheres. He knew 
John Adams, Madison and many other makers of history. 
' Every historian of the United States,' declared Von Hoist, ' must 
stand on Bancroft's shoulders.' The later volumes were a great 
improvement in workmanship. The rate of production was 
slower^ the research wider, the tone less boisterous. Americans 
had learned by bitter experience that the New World was not 
exempt from the trials and imperfections of the Old. 

In 1882, at the age of eighty-two, Bancroft added two volumes 
on the formation of the Constitution. It was the realisation of a 
very old ambition. To fulfil it he had visited the archives of 
most of the thirteen States and studied the reports of the ministers 
of Austria and Holland, France and England. The book is a 
long tribute to the greatness and goodness of Washington. 
Madison is hailed as the chief architect of the Constitution, and 
Hamilton receives something less than his due. He looks at the 
work and finds it good — good for order, good for liberty, good 
for the individuality of every citizen, a marvellous blend of 



THE UNITED STATES 407 

strength and flexibility. The work closes with a glance at the CHAP, 
contrasted circumstances of the Old and New World, the former XXI 
groaning under tyranny and on the eve of revolution, the latter 
entering into the Promised Land. ' In America a new people 
had risen up without king, princes or nobles. They were more 
sincerely religious, better educated, of purer morals, of serener 
minds than the men of any former republic. In the happy 
morning of their existence they had chosen justice for their 
guide.' 

Bancroft's idealisation of Puritan America was repeated by 
Palfrey, who wrote a ' History of New England ' to the outbreak 
of the War of Independence. His admiration for the colonists is 
too great and his gratitude for their services to political liberty 
too deep to allow him to be critical. Without applauding religious 
intolerance, he finds excuses for it ; but his book is learned, clear 
and accurate. He had delved deep in the English archives, and 
no previous historian had so closely studied the interaction of Old 
and New England during the critical decades of the Puritan era. 
Though inferior in popularity to Bancroft, he reached a higher 
level. Indeed Professor Jameson has pronounced his volumes 
the best single piece of work on any part of the colonial period. 
More critical methods were employed by Hildreth, who, though 
writing before Palfrey, belongs by spirit to a later generation. 
His ' History of the United States ' was written with the express 
purpose of tempering the extravagant laudation which Bancroft 
had rendered fashionable. His aim, he informed his readers, was 
to give ' undress portraits of our progenitors.' The result of the 
experiment was described in the preface to a second edition. 
' My presumption in bursting the bubble of a colonial golden 
age of fabulous purity and virtue has given very serious offence, 
especially in New England.' He audaciously declared that the 
period before 1789 was largely the domain of myth ; and his 
sceptical volumes, like a cold north wind, blew away many a 
patriotic legend. Thus while Bancroft declares the Salem witch- 
craft to be merely a regrettable lapse, Hildreth, who relates it 
at pitiless length, finds in it the irrefragable evidence of an almost 
savage society. In the second part of his work, continuing the 
narrative to 182 1, he broke new ground and supplied the first 
critical survey of the early Presidencies. American historians, 
like American politicians, were divided into Federalists and 
Democrats. Bancroft's hero was Jefferson, whom Hildreth 
dismissed as a demagogue ; for, like Hamilton, he had a low 
opinion of the average man. He had access to few official or 
private collections, and his style was poor ; but his business-like 



4 o8 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, narrative taught Americans that their history must be studied 
XXI i n the same critical spirit as that of other countries. 

The scientific exploration of American history dates from 
the last two decades of the nineteenth century. The first authori- 
tative account of the settlement of the American continent 
was given in the co-operative work edited by Justin Winsor, the 
famous librarian of Harvard. The ' Narrative and Critical 
History of America ' begins with a volume on the Aborigines, 
and traces the explorations and settlements of the European 

races, concluding with the establishment of the United States. 

The immense range, the wealth of new material, the authority 
of numerous specialists go far to justify the contention that it is 
the most important contribution to American historiography. 
The critical essays on the sources of information, the elaborate 
notes, the illustrations and maps place the work in a position by 
itself. Among the most valuable chapters are those of the editor, 
himself a specialist in the history and cartography of early 
colonisation. Sir Clements Markham narrated Pizarro's con- 
quest of Peru and the emancipation of South America. The 
history of the English colonies, on the other hand, before and 
after the conflict with the Mother Country, is slight and discon- 
nected. The work closes with a miscellaneous volume on the 
Hudson Bay Company, Arctic exploration, Canada under the 
British Crown, and Spanish America. It is thus less a narrative 
history than a companion for the scholar, summarising the 
labours of a century on the colonisation of the New World. 

A less successful example of co-operation was given by the 
colossal compilation which owes its origin to the wealthy Cali- 
fornian, Hubert Howe Bancroft. 1 Retiring from a publishing 
business in middle age he spent enormous sums on the purchase 
of books and pamphlets, newspapers and manuscripts, and the 
copying of local records. A Russian was dispatched to Alaska 
and Spaniards to Mexico. Veteran pioneers were visited and 
their memories recorded. Thus a superb library was formed as 
the foundation of an exhaustive survey of Central and Western 
America. With these materials the ' History of the Pacific 
States ' was compiled in thirty-four stout volumes by a staff of 
assistants and revised by the editor. Useful from their freight of 
documents, they naturally lack the higher qualities of historical 
writing. They may be compared to the guides of Baedeker or 
Murray, where the name and personality of the author are sup- 
pressed and in which the reader only looks for tabulated facts. 
Beginning with the States of Central America the work proceeds 
1 He describes and defends his literary methods in his Recollections, 1912- 



THE UNITED STATES 409 

northwards through Mexico, Texas and California, to Oregon, CHAP. 
Washington, British Columbia and Alaska. It is regrettable XXI 
that the task of utilising the priceless collection of sources should 
have been entrusted to a literary bureau and supervised by an 
inexperienced amateur. Several attempts at a general history 
have been made in the last twenty years, the most serviceable by 
Channing and Woodrow Wilson, while a co-operative survey has 
been edited by Hart. Fiske's pictures of the colonial era have 
gained a rare popularity. The admirable series of ' American 
Statesmen ' covers the ground in great detail from the beginning 
of the conflict with England to the end of the Civil War. Nearly 
all are of high quality, while a few, notably Carl Schurz' ' Life of 
Clay/ are works of enduring value. By far the most valuable 
work on the early Presidencies is the monumental study of 
Jefferson and Madison by Henry Adams, whose nine volumes 
rest on prolonged research in both hemispheres and present 
a lucid record of foreign and domestic policy during sixteen 
eventful years. 

The most important study of recent events is the ' History of 
the United States from the Compromise of 1850,' by James Ford 
Rhodes, who narrates the critical years of the slavery struggle 
with a detachment and impartiality which no other American 
has approached. He shares the repugnance of his contemporaries 
for slavery and rejoices at its disappearance ; but he has no 
hard words for the men who appeared to be fighting for its 
maintenance. Like Gardiner, Rhodes lacks the magic of style ; 
but the two men are alike in their breadth of sympathy. The 
first two volumes trace the gathering of the storm, the next 
three describe the conflict. He emphasises the vital fact that 
the combatants did not regard it as a struggle between slavery 
and freedom. Many Northerners cared little about the slave ; 
many Southerners, Lee among them, thought slavery wrong. The 
North fought for the maintenance of the Union, the South for 
the right of secession. No Southerner has ever offered a warmer 
tribute to the nobility of Lee or the courage of Stonewall Jackson. 
The statesmen are treated as generously as the soldiers, 
and Jefferson Davis himself is hailed as a worthy foeman. 
The portrait of Lincoln is a masterpiece of judgment and insight. 
The encyclopaedic work of his secretaries, Nicolay and Hay, 
had appeared in 1890 ; but the personality was buried beneath 
ten massive volumes. Rhodes removes the halo of the saint, 
denies him military genius, and gently corrects the common 
exaggeration of his mental powers. But he gains as much as he 
loses. He becomes more human, more lovable, when we watch 



410 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, him battling with his own temptations and, groping his way 
XXI through a forest of difficulties. More clearly than any one he 
saw that the war must be proclaimed and conducted as a defence 
of the Union, not an attack on slavery. To have followed the 
lead of the extreme Abolitionists would have been to court disaster 
for the twin causes of which he was the guardian. 

Rhodes originally intended to bring his story down to 1884, 
when the election of Cleveland showed that the old dividing lines 
had disappeared. As he came within sight of his goal he recog- 
nised that it was needless to travel so far, and determined to 
conclude with 1877, when the last Presidential election fought 
on the negro question was decided, the last troops were with- 
drawn, and the South was allowed to work out the negro problem 
in its own way. The two closing volumes which describe the 
period of Reconstruction display the same imperturbable 
serenity. He is naturally severe on Andrew Johnson and Blaine, 
emphasises Grant's ignorance of statesmanship, and describes 
his rule as the high-water mark of corruption. The work marks 
the immense distance which American scholarship had travelled 
since Bancroft. The crude elation and national arrogance are 
dead and buried, and a younger generation has learned to respect 
the motives of men whose actions the world has agreed to 
condemn. He is also superior to Hoist, who left Germany for 
America shortly after the war. The greater part of his ' Con- 
stitutional and Political History ' is devoted to the generation 
preceding the Civil War. The work breaks off in 1856, and 
therefore only the last two volumes directly compete with 
Rhodes. On its appearance it was without a rival, and it is 
still of use for its abundant learning. But Hoist is a preacher 
as well as an historian. He held slavery to be sin, and his mono- 
graphs on Calhoun and John Brown are written with a pen of 
flame. Brushing aside the controversy between centralisation 
and State Rights, he throws the practical problem of slavery 
into high relief, and turns the political history of a generation 
into a struggle between light and darkness. 

II 

At the same time that Americans were beginning to study 
their national history, Washington Irving x turned his eyes to 
the Old World. Though he loved his country he was essentially 
cosmopolitan, happy in every land and open to every influence. 

1 See P. M. Irving, Life and Letters of W. Irving, 4 vols., 1862-4, and 
C. D. Warner's volume in American Men of Letters, 1884, 



THE UNITED STATES 411 

Though less an historian than an essayist and a humourist, the CHAP. 
American Addison claims a place in the development of American XXI 
historiography. His literary career began in 1809 with Knicker- 
bocker's ' History of New York/ a picture of the Dutch occupa- 
tion blending fact and fancy, humour and satire, which carried 
America by storm. A few years later he sailed for Europe, 
where he remained for seventeen years. The publication of his 
- Sketch-book,' containing Rip van Winkle, made him a favourite 
in both worlds. His love of travel and romance led him to 
Spain in 1826, and two years later he issued a ' Life of Columbus ' 
based on the collections of Navarrete, supplemented by research 
in Madrid and Seville. The work was the first scholarly account 
of the great discoverer in the English language, and, written 
with his usual delicate grace, it appealed to lovers of literature 
as well as of history. Its popularity was so great that the author 
at once composed an abridgment to forestall American pirates. 
The narrative is perhaps a little over-coloured ; but it is a poet's 
appreciation of a great dreamer. 

In the following year Irving published the ' Chronicle of 
the Conquest of Granada,' which he regarded as the best of his 
works. As he fathered his comic history of Dutch America on an 
imaginary antiquarian, so he invented a Spanish friar to chronicle 
the fall of the Moorish Kingdom. Despite its fanciful setting, the 
book contained a good deal of substance and was enriched by 
the author's intimate knowledge of Granada. It was followed 
by a volume of sketches of the Alhambra, a medley of descriptive 
studies and tales which display his humour and sentiment at its 
best. Living within the ruins, he caught the spirit of the place 
which is forever linked with his name. ' It is impossible to con- 
template this delicious abode and not admire the genius and 
poetry of those who devised this earthly paradise. They 
deserved this beautiful country. They won it bravely, they 
enjoyed it generously and kindly. Everywhere I meet traces of 
their sagacity, courage, urbanity, high poetical feeling and 
elegant taste. I am almost tempted to say that they are the 
only people who ever deserved the country, and to pray that 
they may come over from Africa and conquer it again.' Irving 
returned to the United States in 1832 a famous man, and was 
appointed Minister to Madrid ten years later. His plan of a 
history of the conquest of Mexico was generously surrendered 
on learning that Prescott was engaged on the subject. He now 
devoted himself to the study of Mohammed. Though rapidly 
written and not pretending to research, his book was the first 
popular biography and obtained immense success. His closing 



412 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, years were devoted to a ' Life of Washington.' He had no taste 

XXI for research, and confronted by the graver tasks of the historian 

he fails. In the lighter sphere of anecdote and romance he is 

supreme. His fame is secure as the father of American literature 

and the discoverer of the fascination of Spain. 

Where Irving had scratched the surface of Spanish history, 
Prescott 1 dug deep into its foundations. His residence at 
Harvard was rendered unhappily memorable by the terrible 
accident which deprived him of the sight of one eye and inflicted 
irreparable damage in the other. Reading was always difficult and 
often impossible ; but the love of learning was too strong to be 
quenched by physical disabilities. It is curious, in the light of 
his subsequent occupations, that his prolonged visit to Europe 
after leaving the University did not include a visit to Spain. His 
interest was at the time mainly attracted by French and Italian 
literature, and it was not till his friend Ticknor delivered his 
lectures on Spanish literature at Harvard in 1824 that he turned 
to the country with which his name is associated. After consider- 
ing several historical themes, he determined to write a detailed 
narrative of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. His ample 
means allowed him to form a magnificent library, and he obtained 
books and manuscripts from the American Minister to Madrid. 
Since almost every line had to be read to him, ten years of study 
were required before the work appeared in 1837. Though the 
plums had been already picked out by Washington Irving, 

t Prescott 's volumes did not suffer by comparison with those of 
his brilliant countryman. His canvas was larger, his learning 
■far more profound, and his style, though different, not inferior. 
The clash of civilisations within the peninsula, the discovery of 
the New World, the union of Aragon and Castile into a strong 

, kingdom, the personality of the two rulers, the beginnings of 
the Inquisition — here were themes to make the fortune of an 

* historian. Ferdinand is portrayed as a wise and successful 
ruler, despite his cold and selfish character. Isabella is the heroine 
of the book, equally eminent in mind and heart, a perfect woman 
with the brain of a man. Her only weakness, religious intoler- 
ance, was the fault of her time. Prescott writes of the Inquisi- 
tion with a strength of feeling rare in his tranquil pages ; but 
he is wholly free from prejudice against Catholicism. His 

1 See Ticknor's admirable Life of Prescott, 1864 ; Ogden's volume in 
American Men of Letters, 1904; and d'Haussonville, Ltudes Biogra- 
phiques et Literaires, 1879. There is a good though brief sketch in 
Seccombe's Introduction to The Conquest of Peru, Everyman's Library. 
Cp. Ticknor's Life, Letters and Journals, 2 vols., 1876. 



THE UNITED STATES 413 

Ximenes, though rigid and despotic, is a commanding figure ; CHAP. 
Columbus a hero without fear and without reproach 5 Gonsalvo, XXI 
' the Great Captain,' a man of many virtues, though capable 
of treachery. In addition to the full-length portraits, the 
historian devotes careful attention to administration, literature 
and manners. 

During the long years of preparation he often questioned his 
ability to do justice to so great a theme, and doubted the readiness 
of his countrymen to interest themselves in a detailed narrative. 
Such doubts were immediately dispelled. Daniel Webster 
declared that a comet had suddenly blazed out on the world in 
full splendour. Pascual de Gayangos, the friend and helper of 
many Anglo-Saxon historians, contributed a warm eulogy to the 
Edinburgh Review, while Ford, author of the famous ' Handbook,' 
praised it in the Quarterly. Lord Holland pronounced it the 
most important historical work since Gibbon. In France Guizot 
and Mignet were laud in its praise. Translated into several 
languages, it was the first historical work produced in America 
to enjoy an international reputation. ' The Reign of Ferdinand 
and Isabella' deserved its reputation. Though not the most 
brilliant, it is certainly the most solid achievement of its author, 
and it has never been superseded. Strengthened by new matter 
in successive editions, its value continually increased. In particu- 
lar the third edition, appearing in 1841, was enriched through 
the good offices of Gayangos with the manuscript correspondence 
of ' the Catholic Kings,' found at the breaking up of the Saragossa 
convents. Not every part was watertight. The survey of 
Arab polity and culture before the fall of Granada was based I 
largely on the treacherous researches of Conde. The portrait 
of Isabella is too rose-coloured, though it is nearer life than 
Bergenroth's picture of a despotic hypocrite. Justin Winsor 
declared the picture of Columbus too flattering. The account of 
the Inquisition accepts Llorente too readily. But few works 
written before 1840 require so little adaptation to render them 
trustworthy guides for students of to-day. 

From Ferdinand and Isabella to the Spanish conquests in 
the New World was but a step. Prescott employed assistants 
to transcribe manuscripts in Spanish libraries relating to Mexico 
and Peru. Gayangos sent copies from the British Museum, and 
Calderon, the Spanish Minister to Mexico, himself a distinguished 
man of letters, collected documents in situ. Of three years 
spent in the composition of the ' Conquest of Mexico ' no less 
than half w T as devoted to the sketch of Aztec civilisation. The 
splendour of Montezuma's kingdom, degraded though it was by 



414 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, human sacrifices and other brutalities, provided a brilliant 
XXI introduction to the story of the invasion. The march of Cortez 
from the coast and his thrilling adventures constitute the most 
arresting theme that he ever handled. The commanding figure 
of the leader dominates the stage. Ruthless as were the Con- 
quistadores, the Empire they overthrew was still more cruel and 
brutal. The ' Conquest of Mexico ' is the most popular of 
Prescott's books. It appealed and still appeals to all readers, 
young and old, who love adventure and romance for their own 
sake. The descriptions of marches, of battles, of the siege of the 
capital took rank with the pages of Macaulay, and found their 
way straight to the heart of every schoolboy. A few critics 
blamed his lenient treatment of the invaders ; but the historian, 
while condemning their acts, refused to castigate them for not 
being in advance of their time. ' Never call hard names,' 
; he wrote in his diary ; ' it is unhistorical, unphilosophical, un- 
1 gentlemanlike.' He was at all times sparing of judgments. The 
book was praised by Catholics for its fairness to their Church, 
while Quincy Adams declared that it was difficult to tell whether 
the author was Protestant or Catholic, monarchist or republican. 
The favourable judgment of Humboldt, ' the most competent 
critic my work has to encounter,' gave him special pleasure. The 
verdict of Irving, which he valued next to that of the great 
traveller, was equally flattering. The gravest fault of the book 
passed unrecognised. When archaeology revealed the secrets 
of Aztec Mexico, the civilisation of Montezuma turned out to be 
far less brilliant than Prescott, following the Spanish chroniclers, 
had believed. The ' Conquest of Peru ' was a less arresting theme. 
Pizarro is of smaller calibre than Cortez, and there is less excuse 
for his fiendish cruelties. Moreover, the civil wars of the Con- 
quistadores destroy the dramatic unity of the story. He com- 
plained of his subject as second-rate and spoke of the quarrels 
of banditti over their spoils. In Mexico his sympathies were on 
the whole with the Spaniard, in Peru against him. Once more 
the sketch of the indigenous civilisation is the weakest part of the 
work, for the researches of Sir Clements Markham were to reveal 
a widely different world. 

In 1842 Ford urged Prescott to write the life of Philip II, 
' an almost virgin subject,' and the historian had made large 
collections before he was free to carry out his plan. Mignet 
procured copies of documents at Paris. Gayangos not only 
delved in the archives of London and Simancas, but secured the 
opening of the treasure-houses of the Alvas and other great 
Spanish families. The work was begun in 1849, and the first 



THE UNITED STATES 415 

two volumes appeared in 1855. His life was the history of the CHAP. 
world. Abroad the struggle with England , the war in the Nether- XXI 
lands, the defeat of the Turks ; at home the rebellion of the 
Moriscoes, the reign of the Inquisition, the tragedy of Don 
Carlos. It was a theme to tempt an historian who had already 
won world-wide fame. Prescott's death interrupted the narra- 
tive when it had reached 1580 ; but the three volumes form a 
noble torso. Judging Philip by the ideas of his time, he finds it 
possible to pardon and even to admire. ' You have by nature 
the judicial mind/ wrote the hot-blooded Motley, who confided 
to his wife that Prescott's Philip was ' altogether too mild and 
flattered a portraiture of that odious personage.' Among his 
achievements none is more notable than that of rendering the 
great Catholic ruler fully intelligible. 

While engaged on Philip , Prescott turned aside for a few 
months to record the closing days of his father. He had often 
been urged to write the history of Charles V, but he considered 
Robertson sufficiently trustworthy to render a comprehensive 
narrative unnecessary. He was willing, however, to supplement 
his predecessor by an account of the Emperor's cloister life. He 
had realised its real character from documents copied for him 
at Simancas, and had utilised his materials in the first volume of 
' Philip II,' written in 1851 but not published till 1854. During 
these intervening years the truth was revealed by no less than 
three historians. A Simancas archivist had written an account of 
the retreat , with large extracts from the archives. His manuscript 
had been bought by the French Government after his death and 
sent to the Foreign Office at Paris, where it lay neglected till 
Stirling-Maxwell, after a visit to Yuste in 1849, utilised it for 
his 'Cloister Life of Charles V,' which appeared in 1852. The 
success of the book led Mignet and Gachard to follow up the clue. 
All three were laid under contribution in the narrative written 
in 1855 by Prescott, who, however, added nothing to their 
researches. Enriched with this substantial supplement Robert- 
son's book entered on a new lease of life. 

Prescott's services are not difficult to define. He was one 
of the most conspicuous of the brilliant amateurs whose works 
created a world-wide interest in history during the middle 
decades of the nineteenth century. He was more attracted by 
the concrete aspects of life than by ideas. He possessed a genuine 
talent for stately narrative, and knew how to choose subjects 
which gave full scope to his talents. He was not always critical 
in the use of his authorities, nor was he a philosophic historian 
interested in social evolution. On the other hand, while Grote 



416 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, and Macaulay, Carlyle and Froude, Bancroft and Motley made 
XXI their histories vehicles of political and religious propaganda, 
his pages are free from hero-worship and party bias. He stood 
aloof from public life, and had no ambition to play the prophet 
or the moralist. If this reserve renders his writings less vital, 
it saves them from the reaction which accompanies the discredit 
of once popular watchwords. 

When Prescott had been at work for some years on the reign 
of Philip II, he learned that a young fellow-countryman was 
studying the revolt of the Netherlands. He encouraged him to 
continue, lent him materials, and heralded the publication of 
his work. The appearance of ' The Rise of the Dutch Republic ' 
in 1856 satisfied him that his confidence had not been misplaced. 
A native of Massachusetts, like Bancroft and Prescott, Motley x 
was a precocious and imaginative child, and his future eminence 
was clearly foreseen at Harvard by Wendell Phillips and Holmes. 
Having learned German at a school where Bancroft was a master, 
he determined to follow his example. He entered Gottingen, 
where he formed a lifelong friendship with Bismarck, and when 
the two students migrated to Berlin they shared a lodging. The 
welcome extended to his essays after his return encouraged 
him to undertake larger tasks, and he determined to narrate the 
rise of the Dutch Republic. ' I did not first make up my mind 
to write a history and then cast about for a subject. My subject 
had taken me up, drawn me in, and absorbed me into itself.' 
Leaving for Europe in 1851 he plunged into the archives of 
Belgium, Holland and Germany. He spoke of his digging in 
subterranean depths of black-letter folios in half a dozen lan- 
guages, dark, grimy and cheerless as coalpits. But he added 
that he had not been working underground for so long without 
hoping that he would make some few people better and wiser. 
Above all, he had found one great, virtuous and heroic character, 
who was never inspired by any personal ambition and was worthy 
of a place beside Washington. He familiarised himself with the 
scenes of his drama. ' I haunt it,' he wrote of the Grande Place 
at Brussels, ' because it is my theatre. Here were enacted so 
many tragedies, so many stately dramas which have been 
familiar to me so long, that I have got to imagine myself invested 
with a kind of property in the place.' After ten years' incessant 
labour the book was published in London in 1856 at his own 
expense. Like Prescott, the unknown author won fame in a day. 
In the Westminster Review Froude declared that the book would 

1 See O. W. Holmes, Motley, 1878, and Correspondence of J. L. Motley, 
2 vols., 1889. 



THE UNITED STATES 417 

take its place among historical classics, and that in dramatic CHAP, 
description no modern historian, except perhaps Carlyle, sur- XXI 
passed him. In his own country he was immediately placed by 
the side of Bancroft, Irving and Prescott. The latter paid a warm 
public tribute to the work which he had generously encouraged. 
Guizot wrote an introduction to a French translation, and the 
Archivist-General of Holland superintended the Dutch edition. 

The choice of the subject was in itself a master-stroke. One of 
the greatest crises in history, one of the cardinal chapters in the 
development of modern liberty, had been left to men of letters. 
Motley's theme, indeed, surpassed those of Prescott himself in 
its tense passion and arresting fascination. The researches on 
which the work rested were wide and profound. Few produc- 
tions of the age of amateurs are based so largely on contemporary 
documents. ' I go day after day to the archives,' he wrote to 
Holmes. ' Here I remain among my fellow-worms, feeding on 
these musty mulberry-leaves, out of which we are afterwards 
to spin our silk. It is something to read the real signs-manual 
of such fellows as William of Orange, Egmont, Alexander Farnese, 
Philip II, Cardinal Granvelle and the rest of them.' The work 
revealed one of the greatest writers of the century. Free from the 
magniloquence of Bancroft and the stiffness of Prescott, it repre- 
sents the high-water mark of achievement in American historical 
literature. The great scenes of the story, from the death of 
Egmont and Horn to the defence of Leyden and the assassina- 
tion of William the Silent, rank among the noblest passages of 
English prose. He was a master of pageantry and colour, and 
his lifelong friend Oliver Wendell Holmes compared him to 
Rubens. 

Motley entered keenly into the struggles which he set himself 
to record. He told his father of his satisfaction in ' pitching into 
Alva and Philip to my heart's content.' ' We may congratulate 
ourselves,' wrote Prescott when the book appeared, ' that it was 
reserved for one of our countrymen to tell the story of this memor- 
able revolution, which in so many of its features bears a striking 
resemblance to our own.' Motley regarded the revolt of the 
Dutch as every American of his generation regarded the revolt 
of the Thirteen Colonies. It was a struggle for freedom, a holy 
war, a conflict between light and darkness. Philip is the evil one, 
Alva his bloodthirsty agent, William the Silent the heroic cham- 
pion of liberty who lives and dies for his people. Catholicism, 
symbolised by the Inquisition, is the religion of slaves and 
bigots, Protestantism the faith of free men. Such passionate 
partisanship, natural enough half a century ago, is foreign to the 



418 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, cooler temper of to-day. Even at the moment of its appearance, 
XXI Guizot, staunch Protestant though he was, gently chided its 
partiality, adding that the bias was so obvious that it was not 
likely to do harm. Prescott complained that he had been rather 
hard on Philip. Kervyn de Lettenhove and other Catholic writers 
have removed more than one of Motley's heroes from the pedestal 
on which he set them. The Dutch historians themselves, led by 
Fruin and Blok, regard their ancestors with a more critical eye than 
their American champion. We enjoy the burning pages as much 
as our fathers, but the spell of their authority is broken for ever. 
Motley's plan embraced the War of Independence to the 
recognition of the Republic in 1648. The first part was hardly 
published when he set to work on the ' History of the United 
Netherlands.' ' My canvas is very broad, and I have not got a 
central heroic figure to give unity and flesh and blood to the scene. 
It will be, I fear, duller and less dramatic' England entered the 
struggle, and the countries in combination succeeded in crippling 
the power of Spain ; but the fate of the revolted provinces 
long trembled in the balance. Farnese was a redoubtable foe, 
and the Protestants suffered from the loss of their beloved chief. 
Maurice was a better soldier than his father, but had neither 
political instinct nor personal fascination. If the book is 
necessarily less popular than its predecessor, it is in no way the 
fault of the historian. He explored for the first time the foreign 
policy of the later years of Elizabeth, whose fame was not 
enhanced in the process. The first two volumes hardly yielded 
in interest to their predecessors ; but the third and fourth were 
too full of diplomatic intrigues. ' I don't know whether my last 
two volumes are good or bad,' he wrote. ' I only know they are 
true — but that need not make them amusing.' 

He had hoped to reach the Thirty Years War, and the 
' Life of Barnevelt ' was rather a digression than a con- 
tinuation. It was no longer the strife of Holland against 
Spain, of Geneva against Rome, but a squalid story of 
domestic discord. He discovered at the Hague the autograph 
letters of Barnevelt during the last few years of his life, 
written in such a hand that no one had ever attempted to read 
them. This treasure-trove became the foundation of his work. 
He was delighted to do honour to a man too little known, whom 
he described as the Prime Minister of European Protestantism. 
His belief that he could handle the highly controversial subject 
more impartially than Barnevelt 's countrymen was erroneous. 
His ardent love of liberty and proneness to hero-worship made 
him once again an eager partisan. As a Unitarian he naturally 



THE UNITED STATES 419 

supported the Latitudinarians against the Calvinists. Each CHAP, 
party claimed to represent the national religion. Of the seven XXI 
Provinces only two were Arminian ; Barnevelt therefore asked 
for each Province the right to determine its official cult. When 
Maurice took possession of one of the churches he levied a 
body of mercenaries. The Statholder was supported by the 
States-General, and Barnevelt was executed after a sham trial. 
Convinced of his patriotism and sympathising with his dislike of 
an iron Calvinism, Motley hails him as a patriot and a martyr, 
while Maurice appears as the ruthless soldier who hurried his 
innocent rival to the scaffold. 

While the earlier books had been received with rapture in 
Holland, the ' Barnevelt ' provoked sharp criticism Groen van 
Prinsterer, the editor of the Orange Correspondence, at once 
composed a voluminous reply. 1 The work which appeared to 
Guizot a great historical plea for religious and political liberty 
seemed to the Calvinist historian an insult to the memory of a 
national hero. He contrasts Motley's testimony to the political 
worth of Calvinism with his contempt for its faith and philosophy. 
The Unitarian, he added, did not care about evangelical religion. 
Barnevelt 's death was not the work of Maurice but of the people, 
who arose to defend biblical religion against the sham Christian- 
ity of Arminius. Maurice merely defended the Reformed Church 
and the authority of the central government against attack. He 
had no desire for Barnevelt 's death, though he might well have 
stopped it. That Motley did some injustice to the Statholder 
is evident ; but Maurice was not quite so innocent as Groen 
suggests. Barnevelt, declares Blok, sinned through obstinacy, wil- 
fulness and intolerance, but his execution was a judicial murder. 
' Both parties were culpable ; but the dominant party committed 
the greater sin.' Three years after the publication of his last 
book Motley was dead. Though he had not accomplished his full 
purpose he had done enough to immortalise his name. He estab- 
lished for ever the importance of the struggle of the Nether- 
lands against Spain. No American historian approaches him 
in intensity of conviction and expression ; for his enthusiasm 
for liberty was the passion of his life, and he makes his readers 
feel that the civilisation of to-day rests on the struggles and 
sacrifices of the past. 

Unlike Prescott and Motley, Parkman's 2 conquest of fame was 

1 Maurice et Barnevelt, 1875. 

2 See Farnham, Life of Parkman, 1900 ; Sedgwick's volume in American 
Men of Letters, 1904; Quarterly Review, April 1897, and Seccombe, 
Introduction to The Conspiracy of Pontiac, Everyman's Library. 



420 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, slow and difficult. Like other members of what Wendell 
xx * Holmes called the Brahmin caste of New England, he was born 
in Boston and educated at Harvard. At school he devoured 
the novels of Fenimore Cooper. His interest in the struggle 
between France and England for North America began at 
college, and in his vacations he visited the battle-fields. In 
1843, at the age of twenty, he dedicated his life to the task which 
was not completed till 1892. He visited the untamed Indian 
tribes in the North- West, living for weeks in a Sioux village. His 
experiences were recorded in his first book, ' The Oregon Trail,' 
which, despite its freshness and its picturesque descriptions, 
attracted little notice. ' The Conspiracy of Pontiac,' with 
which he made his debut as an historian, fared scarcely better. 
The expulsion of France from Canada after the victory of Wolfe 
was followed by an Indian rising in 1763. Pontiac was the 
last great chief, and with his overthrow the Canadian Indians 
pass out of history. Parkman's knowledge of the theatre of 
war and of the surviving tribes enabled him to reconstruct the 
life and organisation of their ancestors. A few good judges were 
struck by the spirited style and the obvious mastery of the 
material ; and the lack of encouragement did not deter him from 
the prosecution of his self-imposed task. But for ten years he 
was too ill to undertake exacting work. The hardships he had 
encountered during his sojourn among the Indians had shattered 
his health, and his eyes were of little more use to him than 
Prescott's. 

' The Conspiracy of Pontiac ' was rather an appendix than an 
introduction to the work of his life. While the final struggle of 
Wolfe and Montcalm was familiar to everybody, the story of the 
colonisation of Canada by the French was unknown. ' The 
Pioneers of France in the New World ' recorded the Huguenot 
settlement in Florida and its ruthless extinction by the Spaniards, 
followed by Cartier's exploration of the St. Lawrence and the 
foundation of Quebec by Champlain. Two years later a volume 
on the Jesuit missions revealed the sublime devotion of the men 
who suffered unspeakable tortures and gave their lives in the 
effort to reclaim the Hurons and the Iroquois from unbridled 
savagery. No volume of the series is more thrilling than this 
tribute to Catholic missionaries by a Puritan freethinker. A 
third work was devoted to the bold attempt of La Salle to link 
Canada to the mouth of the Mississippi by a line of French forts 
and hem in the English colonies ; a fourth to the Old Regime 
in Canada, a dark picture of French administration. A fifth 
described the work of Frontenac, the greatest and most masterful 



THE UNITED STATES 421 

of the Governors, the central figure of the whole work and the CHAP, 
hero of the historian. XXI 

The story had now reached 1701 ; but instead of pursuing 
the narrative, Parkman, who was growing old, sprang over half a 
century to the dramatic struggle of Montcalm and Wolfe. The 
heroism of the two commanders and the greatness of the issue 
involved give an epic character to the conflict. Still able to 
work, he finally bridged the gap by ' Half a Century of Conflict.' 
His reputation travelled slowly, and when Fiske, in a London 
lecture in 1880, pronounced him the first of American historians, 
his name was scarcely known to an English audience. He has, 
indeed, no superior among American historians. Roosevelt 
dedicated to him his ' Winning of the West.' ' Those of us who 
have spent much of our time on the frontier realise that your 
works must be the models for all historical treatment of the 
founding of new communities.' Professor Hart calls him the 
greatest of all writers who have made America their theme. 
Goldwin Smith compared him to Tacitus. His theme, though 
of narrower appeal than the Spanish Monarchy or the Dutch 
Republic, was of immense importance and inexhaustible interest. 
It was, indeed, the prologue to the drama of the Revolution. The 
Colonies were powerless to expel the French ; but the removal 
of France, made the revolt against England possible. 

Parkman's researches in American and European archives 
were profound. He knew every corner of the stage on which 
the drama was played. He worked with exceptional accuracy 
and was wholly free from partisanship, though French Canadians 
declared that he had been unjust to them. His knowledge of 
the Indians was derived from life, not from books. His style, at 
first somewhat florid, gained in simplicity and power, and his 
descriptive passages are among the finest in American literature. 
He was fitte'd by his martial temper for describing perils and 
adventures. Throughout life he retained a deep admiration for 
strong men and vigorous action. Nothing but an iron will 
would have carried him through his troubles, and there is no 
trace of the invalid in his books. He hated weakness, despised 
the Abolitionists, and had no belief in democracy. ' Many of 
his traits of mind and character,' records Farnham, his friend and 
biographer, ' were those of a soldier. He liked a fight for its 
own sake, and for the energy, courage and strength it called 
forth.' He never forgave the Quakers for refusing to fight the 
Indians. He longed to take part in the Civil War ; but he had 
abundant opportunity of showing his bravery in his own library. 
There is no more heroic figure in the history of letters. 



422 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. When Parkman ceased to write; a new star was rising in the 

XXI historical firmament. Without possessing the literary skill of 
his predecessors Mahan 1 has conquered world-wide fame, and 
the effect of his work has been felt far beyond the boundaries of 
scholarship. When appointed Lecturer at the Naval War 
College at Newport he quickly realised that the influence of sea 
power had never been seriously investigated. The neglect of 
the wider aspects of naval history was particularly noticeable 
in England, the greatest of Maritime Powers. ' The Influence 
of Sea Power on History, 1660-1783/ published in 1889, opens 
with a discussion of the conditions affecting maritime strength, 
geographical position, physical conformation, extent of territory 
and population, the characteristics of the people and the govern- 
ment of the State. The sea itself is a great highway, or, better, 
a wide common. The history of Europe for more than two 
centuries has been largely a struggle between the Western 
Powers for the control of the sea. Beginning his survey with 
the Dutch War of Charles II he emphasises the extent to which 
the commercial interests of England were involved in the war 
of the Spanish Succession, from which England emerged as a 
Mediterranean Power with Gibraltar and Port Mahon. In the 
Seven Years War Wolfe's success would have been impossible 
without the fleet, which opened the St. Lawrence and prevented 
the arrival of reinforcements from France. The importance of 
sea power is enforced still more powerfully by the American War 
of Independence. Choiseul had strengthened the French fleet 
which, joined by the Spanish, nearly equalled that of England. 
It was owing to them that we failed to reduce the Atlantic 
seaboard and were therefore unable to cope effectively with the 
rebellion. Finally it was the presence of De Grasse in Chesapeake 
Bay which led to the capitulation of York Town and virtually 
to the collapse of the war. 

The resounding success of the book encouraged the author 
to continue his survey. In 1892 appeared a second work, tracing 
the history of the Great War, which he shows to have been a war 
of commerce for England. He defends Pitt against the attacks 
of Macaulay ; for he realised that control of the sea was the 
key of the problem, and with Trafalgar the worst was over. 
' Those far distant, storm-beaten ships, on which the Grand Army 
never looked, stood between it and the dominion of the world.' 
The Continental System, designed to ruin England, inflicted far 
greater damage on France ; for the Orders in Council, together 

1 For an expert appreciation of his first two works see Eng. Hist* 
Review, Oct. 1893. 



THE UNITED STATES 423 

with the Berlin and Milan decrees to which they were a reply, CHAP, 
went far to destroy the neutral carrier, thus injuring France XXI 
most because she most needed his services. Mahan next turned 
his attention to the grandest figure of those eventful years, 
' the one man who summed up and embodied the greatness of 
the possibilities which sea power comprehends, the man for 
whom genius and opportunity worked together to make him 
the personification of the navy of Great Britain.' The novelty of 
the book, which contained little new material, lay in the discus- 
sion and explanation of Nelson's achievements. He shows that 
his strength lay in promptitude of action, which was not the 
fruit of brilliant improvisations but of profound deliberation 
before the fight. His main object was to measure the achieve- 
ment of one ' the simple mention of whose name suggests not 
merely a personality or a career but a great force.' But he also 
desired to reveal the man himself and to disentangle him from 
his glory. In the embittered controversy relating to his treat- 
ment of the Neapolitan republicans he defends his conduct 
with great spirit. ' Sharer of our mortal weakness, he has 
bequeathed to us a type of single-minded self-devotion that can 
never perish.' The fourth work on the influence of sea power 
is devoted to the war of 1812, which arose from the measures 
taken by England during the fierce struggle with Napoleon. 
The value of the work is enhanced by the survey of the train of 
causes which led to the conflict. He points out that the British 
people was convinced of the right as well as of the need to 
seize their nationals for service wherever found, that Britain 
was engaged in a desperate contest, and that her neglect of 
conventional law was essential to her success. On the other 
hand America was right to resist practices which injured and 
wronged her. 

Mahan's writings owe their importance to the new angle from 
which familiar events are regarded. Few new facts are brought 
to light, and the technical discussion sometimes becomes a little 
wearisome for the civilian reader. Occasionally, perhaps, the 
element of sea power in the determination of a particular 
result is over-emphasised at the expense of other factors. Yet, 
though not the earliest diligent student of naval history, he was 
the first to seize its wider bearings and to make it interesting to 
the non-professional reader. He may fairly be described as the 
founder of a school, for the study of sea power is being vigorously 
pursued both in the Old and the New World. His writings, more- 
over, possess a political as well as an historical importance. He 
strove to rouse the United States to the importance of developing 



424 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, their fleet. In his first book he showed how much American 
XXI independence owed to the ships of France and Spain. His 
biography of Farragut recalled the importance of the fleet in the 
victory of the North. That his works made a profound 
impression on the German Emperor not less than on the directors 
of British policy is no secret. Thus once again an historian 
has helped to make history as well as to record it. 

The present generation of American historians have confined 
themselves almost entirety to their own country. The age of 
brilliant amateurs is at an end. The serious student now goes 
to Berlin and Leipsic to learn the technique of his profession. 
Historians gaze at the colonial period without being dazzled, 
while the high character of Governor Hutchinson and the con- 
scientious convictions of the Loyalists are freely recognised. 
Charles Francis Adams has written with severity of the religious 
intolerance of ' the glacial period ' of Massachusetts history, 
and with scant respect of the ' filiopietistic ' school of Bancroft 
and Palfrey. The occasional outbursts against England which 
disfigure the writings of Lodge are now the exception. From the 
vantage-point of Wisconsin Turner has traced the colonisation 
of the Middle West. If the contribution to the literature of the 
world is smaller, the gains of science are more substantial and 
more enduring. 



CHAPTER XXII 

MINOR COUNTRIES 
I 

In Austria historical production of a high quality is of very CHAP, 
recent date. When Pertz sought collaborators for the Monumenta XXII 
at Vienna, Gentz replied that the formation of a society for the 
study of German history could not be agreeable to the Emperor. 
The censorship was active and vigilant, and the archives were 
only opened to men whose dynastic and religious orthodoxy was 
beyond question. Thus Bucholtz compiled a vast work on 
Ferdinand I, and Chmel wrote a history of Frederick III and his 
son Maximilian. Hurter, 1 a Swiss convert who had won fame 
as the biographer of Innocent III, was invited to Vienna and 
appointed Imperial Historiographer. His labours on the Thirty 
Years War were embodied in his colossal life of Ferdinand II and 
his studies of Wallenstein. All these works bore a semi-official 
character. Welcomed by scholars for their glimpses into a 
jealously guarded treasure-house, they were rather the raw 
material for history than history itself. The most important 
work produced during the dictatorship of Metternich, Hammer's 
massive history of the Ottomans, was based chiefly on material 
collected beyond the frontier. 

A more liberal policy was adopted when Count Leo Thun 
became Minister of Education after the year of revolution. 
He summoned Ficker to Innsbruck, Aschbach and Max Biidinger 
to Vienna. Thus the scholarship of Germany was grafted on the 
culture of Austria. It was not, however, till Arneth 2 became 
Director of the Archives that the Metternich system was finally 
discarded. On visiting London he was struck by the liberality 
with which the archives were opened to every student, while his 
own country forbade the inspection even of its minor treasures. 

1 See H. Hurter, F. Hurter, 2 vols., 1876-7. 

3 See his delightful autobiography, Aus meinem Leben, 2 vols., 1893. 



426 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. The records were the arcana imperii, and belonged to the dynasty 
XXII as exclusively as the Crown Jewels. Arneth gradually broke 
down the barrier, and his life of Prince Eugene contributed both 
to his own fame and to the glory of the House of Hapsburg. For 
the first time the eventful career of the brilliant and attractive 
soldier and statesman, ' the greatest man who ever worked for 
the benefit of Austria,' was traced with the aid of his own letters. 
It was, indeed, the first historical work produced in Austria to be 
widely read. 

Arneth was now trusted in official circles, and the archives 
were placed at his disposal for the great task of his life. The 
' History of Maria Theresa ' is the most important work ever 
produced by an Austrian historian, and is one of the classics of 
historical literature. Based throughout on the inexhaustible 
treasures of the Vienna archives, it illumines the history of almost 
every country in Europe, and presents a full-length portrait of 
the two most attractive figures in the long line of Hapsburg 
rulers. He approached his task with the enthusiasm inspired in 
every Austrian by Maria Theresa, ' the most brilliant personality 
in Austrian history.' The radiant personality of the young 
Queen as wife, mother and ruler is painted with exquisite in- 
sight and sympathy. Her courage during the years of struggle 
made her the idolised ruler of her peoples, and her fame shone 
the more brightly by contrast with her great antagonist. Arneth 
fully concedes the immense ability of the King whom the Queen 
always described as ' the wicked man,' and her son as a rogue of 
genius ; but while Maria Theresa kept her word at whatever cost, 
Frederick was fundamentally dishonourable. When the peace 
of 1748 brought a breathing-space she turned to the work of 
reconstruction. She abolished the exemption of the nobles 
from taxation, reorganised the administration and judicature, 
codified the law, reformed the army. Despite his admiration 
for her noble character and high ability, Arneth is by no means 
blind to her weaknesses. Her greatest fault was bigotry. She 
hated the Jews and was anxious to expel them from her 
dominions. She detested Protestants and was a convinced 
supporter of the censorship. A second failing was her autocratic 
temper. Though tenderly attached to her consort, the Emperor, 
she never allowed him to take part in affairs. She disliked 
contradiction, and was extremely jealous of her prerogatives. 
The most important event of the years of peace was the 
appointment of Kaunitz to the Chancellorship. The relations 
of the Empress and her adviser, here traced for the first time 
in detail, do infinite credit to both. Though Kaunitz was a 



MINOR COUNTRIES 427 

freethinker and a libertine, she never wavered in her confidence. CHAP. 
After the Seven Years War her eldest son entered the Govern- XXII 
ment, and during the latter half of her reign she was no longer 
the undisputed ruler. Intensely devoted to her vast family, she 
had given Joseph a careful education, and she rejoiced in his 
high qualities ; but his instinctive desire to alter whatever 
appeared capable of improvement led him to criticise and 
condemn many of the arrangements for which the Empress was 
responsible. Again, he cared little for religion and warmly 
embraced the anti-clerical views held by most of the Philo- 
sophic Despots. Supported as a rule by Kaunitz he usually 
carried his point ; but the constant friction darkened the closing 
years of the Empress. 

Few books have contributed more to a comprehension of 
modern history, or are more continuously interesting, than 
Arneth's ten volumes on Maria Theresa. They gave the 
Austrian side of two great European wars, related the fortunes 
of the outlying parts of the Empire — Belgium, Bohemia, 
Hungary, Lombardy — as well as of the hereditary possessions 
of the Hapsburgs, and described every aspect of the life of the 
realm — its finance, its law, its learning, its religion. Above all, 
it recreated Maria Theresa, Joseph and Kaunitz, allowing them 
to reveal themselves in their own letters. Arneth's later years 
were mainly devoted to the publication of the immense corre- 
spondence of Maria Theresa and her children. The volumes 
which excited most interest were those containing the letters of 
Marie Antoinette. In 1865 Count Hunolstein and Feuillet de 
Conches published a collection of the Queen's letters which 
aroused doubts as to their authenticity. The forgeries were 
exposed by Sybel, and the controversy was set at rest by the 
publication of the originals in Vienna. While the historian was 
engaged on the life of Maria Theresa he was appointed head of 
the archives in 1868. In 1863 even Ranke had been refused 
permission to see the despatches of the Austrian ambassador 
in Paris in 1756. Arneth now welcomed not only Ranke 
but historians from every country of the old and new 
worlds. When attacked for admitting Sybel, the inveter- 
ate enemy of the House of Hapsburg, he rejoined that in 
no way could Prussian writers be converted from their false 
views of Austrian policy but by examining the records of 
its diplomacy. Though a loyal subject of the Hapsburgs he 
was affected but slightly by national bias, and was wholly free 
from the bitter animosities that disfigure the writings of the 
Prussian School. 



428 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. Where Arneth led, a band of eager students followed. 1 Krones 

XXII wrote the first comprehensive and scholarly survey of the growth 
of the Austrian State. Klopp, 2 a friend of the King of Hanover 
who followed his patron into exile, devoted his life to the defence 
of the Hapsburgs and gross-deutsch principles. Beginning with 
a violent attack on Frederick the Great as the author of the 
dualism which had ruined Germany, he passed to a rehabilitation 
of Tilly and a study of the early years of the Thirty Years War, 
in which Gustavus Adolphus and the Protestant princes appear 
as the enemies of the German nation. The main occupation of his 
later life was a gigantic ' History of the Fall of the House of 
Stuart.' The work, which deals far more with Continental than 
with English history, is of value for its wealth of new material ; 
but it is disfigured by its author's predilection for Austria and 
hostility to France, and is wholly lacking in literary qualities. 
The period of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars has been 
actively explored by Vivenot and Zeissberg, Beer and Schlitter, 
Wertheimer and Fournier. The Restoration was described by 
Anton Springer. The revolution of 1848 was minutely studied 
by Helfert, the last representative of the age and spirit of 
Metternich, while Friedjung has given the Austrian side of the 
struggle which ended at Sadowa, and is now engaged on the early 
years of Francis Joseph. 

The foundation of the Historical Institute at Vienna in 1854, 
on the model of the Ecole des Chartes, inaugurated the systematic 
study of the Middle Ages. 3 It was to a German scholar that it 
was to owe its reputation as one of the finest schools of mediaeval 
study in the world. Theodor Sickel, 4 the son of a Saxon pastor, 
was intended for the Church, but was won for philology by 
Lachmann. Expelled from Berlin in 1849 for his politics, he 
spent two years at Paris in the Ecole des Chartes. Arriving in 
Vienna he at once made the acquaintance of Ottokar Lorenz, 
then a student at the Institute, and was invited to lecture on 
palaeography. He was quickly appointed to the permanent 
staff, and became Director in 1867. Needing material for his 
teaching in palaeography, he edited the ' Monumenta Graphica 
Medii Aevi,' containing two hundred facsimile documents from 
Austrian and Italian archives. A prolonged study of Carolingian 
manuscripts led him to an unrivalled acquaintance with the 

1 The activity of the Academy, founded in 1847, is described in Huber, 
Ceschichte der Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1897, 

2 See W. Klopp, Onno Klopp, 1907. 

3 See Ottenthal, Das Institut fiir osterreichische Geschichtsforschung, 1904. 

4 See Erben's excellent article, Hist. Vierteljahrschrift, vol. xi. 



MINOR COUNTRIES 429 

forms of the time. The ' Acta Carolingorum ' marks the culmina- CHAP, 
tion of the science founded by Mabillon, which had been recently XXII 
carried forward by Delisle's work on the ' Regesta ' of Philip 
Augustus and Huillard-Breholles' collection of the Acts of the 
Emperor Frederick II. In 1874 he joined the Directorate 
of the Monumenta and undertook the Diplomata, himself 
producing two volumes covering the Saxon Emperors. Now 
recognised as the greatest living master of Diplomatic, Sybel 
persuaded him to co-operate in a collection of Imperial 
documents of the Carolingian and Saxon dynasties in facsimile. 
What Mommsen accomplished for inscriptions Sickel achieved 
for the charters of the Middle Ages. His appointment as first 
President of the Austrian Institute at Rome in 1881 was a 
fitting reward of his labours. Devoting his long life to the 
editing of documents his fame is confined to the world of 
scholars ; but in that world it is secure. 

The mediaeval studies of Vienna were rivalled by the labours 
of Innsbruck. A native of Catholic Westphalia Ficker 1 early 
made the acquaintance of Bohmer, by whom he was recommended 
to Count Thun. Appointed to the capital of Tyrol in 1852, he 
laboured without intermission for half a century. Like Sickel, 
he was a master of Diplomatic ; but he was also a productive 
author. His defence of the Empire against Sybel made him 
widely known as a vigorous controversialist not less than an 
erudite historian. His first important book was a study of the 
constitutional position of the Princes of the Holy Roman Empire 
which was hailed by Waitz as epoch-making. A journey to Italy 
in 1861 was devoted to profound researches in the archives, 
which laid the foundation of his ' Studies in the History of Italian 
Administration and Law/ a vast encyclopaedia of learning, 
equally valuable for law and government, the Empire and the 
Church, Germany and Italy. The last decade of his life was 
dedicated to a minute study of the law of inheritance in Germany. 
In knowledge of mediaeval law and institutions he has never been 
surpassed, and he ranks with Waitz and Briinner among their 
most authoritative interpreters. He also devoted many years 
to the editing of documents. Bohmer's ' Regesta ' were credit- 
able as a first attempt, but even his friends could not conceal 
from themselves their technical inadequacy. The revised edition, 
undertaken by Ficker and his pupils, doubled the value of the 
work. The great treatise on Diplomatic grew out of the work 
on the ' Regesta,' and offered the first trustworthy guide through 
the maze of the chancelleries. His influence as a teacher was 
1 See Jung's massive biography, Julius Ficker, 1907. 



430 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, immense. One of his earliest pupils, Huber, wrote a history of 
XXII Austria for the series of Heeren and Ukert ; Miihlbacher, the 
successor of Sickel at the head of the Historical Institute, 
Redlich, the biographer of Rudolf of Hapsburg, Ottenthal, 
Voltelini and other distinguished Austrian scholars, learned in 
his school ; while Druffel, Stieve and Scheffer-Boichorst crossed 
the frontier to learn his critical methods. Though a faithful 
Catholic he possessed friends in every camp, and his works are 
disfigured neither by confessional nor dynastic bias. 

In other countries historical study has accompanied the 
revival of national feeling ; in Bohemia it created it. 1 The 
paralysis which began with the battle of the White Hill in 1620 
lasted for two centuries. The Czech language ceased to be used 
for literary expression, its place being taken by German and 
Latin. Every book published in the Austrian dominions had to 
run the gauntlet of two censors, one representing the Govern- 
ment, the other the Church. Education was in the hands of the 
Jesuits. From this long slumber the country was roused by 
the efforts of five scholars. At the end of the eighteenth century 
Dobrowsky began to arouse interest in Bohemian literature. 
Kollar published a collection of sonnets inspired by burning 
love for the Slavs. Jungmann wrote a history of Bohemian 
literature, and Safarik published his ' Slavic Antiquities.' But 
by far the most celebrated was Palacky, 2 the greatest of Slav 
historians and the creator of the national consciousness of 
Bohemia. The child of Lutheran parents, he was brought up 
in the traditions of the Bohemian Brothers. Educated in 
Pressburg, he always declared that he was no child of German 
culture. He eagerly read Karamsin and Johannes Muller, and 
determined to emulate them. Dobrowsky introduced him to the 
nobles who were interested in Bohemian history; and by whom 
the National Museum at Prague had recently been established. 
Little enthusiasm had hitherto been shown for the institution by 
the Czechs themselves, and the Austrian officials looked on it with 
suspicion. When Palacky boldly maintained that the indiffer- 
ence was rather the fault of the directors than of the people, 
Count Sternberg, the leader of the enterprise, replied that it was 
too late to raise the Bohemian nation from the dead. The young 
scholar retorted that no attempt was being made. In 1828 he 

1 See Count Lutzow, Lectures on the Historians of Bohemia, 1905, and 
History of Bohemian Literature , 1899. 

2 In addition to Lutzow's books see Leger, Etudes Slaves, vol. ii., 1875, 
and Professor Masaryk's booklet, Palacky' s Idee des Bohmischen Volkes, 
Prague, 1899. 



MINOR COUNTRIES 431 

founded a Journal of the Museum, and the first-fruits of his studies CHAP, 
were contained in a volume on early Bohemian historians. XXII 

When Palacky became aware of the wealth of material stored 
in the archives of the castles, he resolved to take the whole of 
Bohemian history for his province. He was appointed Historio- 
grapher, with a salary ; and though the appointment was 
vetoed at Vienna, the Diet was allowed to defray the expenses of 
publication. Thus encouraged he embarked on the composition 
of his work, of which the first volume, dealing with the settlement 
of the Slavs in Bohemia, appeared in 1836. Filled with patriotic 
fervour he idealised the culture and virtue of the primitive 
Czechs. The book only assumed national importance when the 
narrative reached the century of Hus. But the part which 
burst on his fellow-countrymen like a revelation was also the 
part which aroused the greatest resentment at Vienna. While 
Hus and his followers had been caricatured in German and 
Catholic publications as brutal fanatics, Palacky showed that 
their cruelties were surpassed by those of their enemies, and 
revealed the greatness of Ziska and Procopius. The censor 
challenged the statement that Hus' courage at his trial forced 
even his adversaries to admiration. ' The Catholic Church,' 
he declared, ' does not see courage but insolence and obstinacy 
founded on utter blindness.' The historian addressed a manly 
protest to Vienna. ' I cannot believe it to be a necessity of 
Catholicism that every deed and thought of Hus should be 
unconditionally condemned and all circumstances favourable 
to him suppressed. This is what the censor seems to expect ; 
but I would rather give up my work and abandon the study of 
history.' He was none the less compelled to suppress certain 
passages, and to insert interpolations from the censor's pen as 
his own work. Shortly after this unworthy coercion of a great 
scholar the Revolution of 1848 broke out. The police censorship 
of the press being abolished, the historian restored the omissions 
and expunged the interpolations. He was now a great national 
figure. He presided over the Slav Congress at Prague, and was 
elected to the Constituent Assembly at Vienna. When abso- 
lutism was restored he returned to his study ; but with the 
beginning of a milder policy a decade later he was made a Life 
Peer. The Emperor's promise to be crowned King at Prague 
delighted his closing years, for he could not foresee that it would 
never be fulfilled. 

Palacky's first intention had been to bring his history to the 
fatal year 1620 ; but he finally determined to lay down his pen 
in 1526 with the accession of the Hapsburgs. The experience of 



432 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, the Catholic censor was sufficiently disagreeable. The guardian 
XXII f the Hapsburg prestige would have added to his terrors, and 
rendered an account of the Reformation century virtually 
impossible. Moreover his material was so extensive that ten 
volumes were needed for his limited design. Written first in 
German it appeared after 1848 simultaneously in both languages, 
and on revision the early volumes were rendered into Czech. It 
was his achievement to recreate the history of a country, to 
discover and utilise a great mass of new material and to throw 
light on many dark places in the mediaeval history of central 
Europe. The Hussite volumes formed the kernel of the book. 
Helfert wrote an opposition biography ; but the most persistent 
of his critics was Hofler, who was brought from Munich to Prague 
to counteract him. Palacky had little difficulty in showing that 
Hofler's volumes, though printed by the Imperial press, were so 
uncritical as to be almost worthless, while his ignorance of Czech 
was a fatal handicap. Bachmann 1 has categorically declared that 
Palacky is now of no value ; but this severe verdict is only true 
of the first volume. He was led far astray by accepting as genuine 
the Koniginhof manuscripts of songs of the ninth or tenth cen- 
tury, which revealed alofty native culture independent of Teutonic 
influences. He confronted German contempt for Czech culture 
with an idealisation of the Slav, and maintained that Bohemia in 
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was inferior to no country 
except France and Italy in civilisation. His work was not only 
an achievement in scholarship but a political event, a trumpet 
call to an oppressed nationality to raise its head and prove 
itself worthy of its past. 

The lifelong labours of Palacky encouraged the writing as 
well as the reading of Bohemian history. The greatest of his 
pupils, Tomek, 2 devoted his life to the history of Prague. 
Though little known outside Bohemia his work ranks next to 
that of his master in importance. Professor at Prague for forty 
years, first Rector of the Czech University founded in 1881, 
a politician and a deputy, Tomek played a leading part in the 
intellectual life of his country. The choice of his theme was due 
to his master. Twelve volumes, published between 1855 and 
1901, brought the narrative down to 1609. The work is more 
critical and less rhetorical than that of Palacky, who belonged 
to the age of the romantics. Though a Catholic he draws a 
black picture of the Church in the fifteenth century, and recognises 
the sincerity and noble ambitions of Hus. The third great 

1 Geschichte Bohmens, vol. i., 1899. 

2 See Leger's article on Tomek in La Renaissance Tchdque, 1-911. 



MINOR COUNTRIES 433 

Bohemian historian, Anton Gindely, 1 differed from his older CHAP, 
contemporaries both in his mixed descent and in his complete XXII 
freedom from racial bias. His German father spoke only his 
native tongue, his Czech mother both languages. His first 
important work was devoted to the Bohemian Brethren, and 
was designed to inaugurate an elaborate study of the Bohemian 
Reformation. He plunged into the archives at Brussels and the 
Hague, Paris and Simancas. In the latter he found unexpected 
treasures. ' Half of what I have collected,' he wrote, ' is wholly 
new, and the other half shows the already known in a wholly 
different light. I often feel intoxicated with joy.' On returning 
home he became Professor at Prague and Director of the Archives, 
supervising the publication of the proceedings of the Bohemian 
Diet at the beginning of the Thirty Years War. His history of 
the reign of Rudolf II, published after his return, threw a flood 
of light on a dark corner of history. It was succeeded by four 
volumes on the Thirty Years War, bringing the narrative to 
1623. Breaking off at this point he composed a popular history 
of the war, based partly on lectures delivered to the Crown 
Prince Rudolf. He then issued massive monographs on the 
career of Wallenstein between 1625 and 1630 and on Bethlen 
Gabor. He was one of the most impartial of men. Though a 
Catholic, his religious views cannot be guessed from his writings. 
He exposed the political incapacity of the Protestant princes of 
the Empire and rejected the dynastic and confessional portrait 
of Ferdinand II. But though he had no superstitious reverence 
for the House of Hapsburg, he treats Wallenstein as a traitor to 
the Emperor. His massive fragment remains unsurpassed, and 
his popular sketch is the best rapid survey of a perplexing epoch. 
His mixed blood and serene temperament shielded him from 
many temptations. He was perhaps more German than Czech, 
and when Prague University was divided he chose the German 
section. 

It is not surprising that Hungarian history 3 should have 
been strongly patriotic ; and it is only in very recent years 
that it has begun to assume a more objective character. The 
passionate sense of national self-consciousness sought in the 
story of the Magyars at once a vindication of Hungarian claims 
to autonomy and a source of strength in times of trouble. Thus 
general surveys have attracted historical scholars more than the 

1 See Ward's article, Eng. Hist. Review, July 1893. 

- See Flegler, ' Beitrage z. Wurdigung d. ungarischen Geschicht- 
schreibung,' Historische Zeilschrift, vol. xix. ; and Revue de Synthese 
historique, vol. ii. 

2 F 



434 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, patient investigation of problems and periods. The first com- 
XXII prehensive narrative was the work of Fessler, the son of German 
parents, successively a Capucin, a freemason and a Protestant 
pastor. The work brought the story down to 1811 and breathes 
the spirit of pure Magyar patriotism. A more popular survey 
was that of Mailath, who stops short at the accession of Maria 
Theresa. Unlike Fessler, who was a democrat, Mailath, himself 
a nobleman, wrote from the standpoint of the aristocracy. 
Though the erudition was superficial, the style was attractive ; 
and the revised edition, which continued the narrative to 1849, 
was an abler performance. Between the two editions Bishop 
Horvath, a friend of Kossuth, produced a brief history, which 
rested on a study of diplomatic records and supplied a clear 
and well-arranged narrative from a democratic standpoint. It 
was not, however, till the appearance of Marczali that Hun- 
garian historiography broke the shackles of a narrow patriotism. 
His popular sketch of the development of the Hungarian people 
and his works on Hungary under Maria Theresa and her 
sons represent the highest achievement of Magyar scholarship. 
The need of to-day is not a new national history but a rich crop 
of monographs. 

II 

The large number of States of which Italy was long composed 
encouraged the study of regional history ; and to this day 
Italian historiography is mainly governed by these divisions, 
the Tuscan devoting himself to Tuscany, the Venetian to Venice, 
the Neapolitan to Sicily and the South. The two writers who 
attracted most attention during the years following the downfall 
of Napoleon gave their books a strong political flavour. In the 
early days of the French Revolution Botta ] had been arrested 
as a republican, and later accompanied the French arms as a 
doctor. On the abdication of the King of Sardinia in 1798 
he served the Provisional Government, and, after Marengo, the 
French. He won fame by his history of the American War, 
which had a large sale beyond the Atlantic as well as in Europe. 
On the Restoration he moved to Paris, where he passed the rest 
of his life. His chief work, the ' History of Italy during the 
Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars/ was, like its predecessor, 
a manifesto of liberal and nationalist ideas. Italy is depicted 
as the victim of foreign barbarians, and her right to an indepen- 
dent life is loudly proclaimed. The vivid touches of a man who 

1 See Pavesio, Carlo Botta, 1874. 



MINOR COUNTRIES 435 

had witnessed many of the scenes he describes rendered the book CHAP, 
a great favourite, and the contagious patriotism helped to keep XXII 
alive the national idea in an era of reaction. On its conclusion 
he compiled a history of Italy from the sixteenth century, 
designed as a continuation of Guicciardini. Colletta's l ' History 
of Naples ' during the Great War is of higher importance. The 
author fought against the French in 1798 ; but he knew the 
vices of the Bourbon regime, and was not sorry when the army 
of the Revolution entered the city. He held important civil 
and military posts under King Joseph and Murat. Joining the 
revolution in 1820 he became Minister of War, and on the sup- 
pression of the constitutional movement he was imprisoned in 
Austria. Two years later he was permitted to live in Florence, 
where he wrote the record of his life. The book is a prolonged 
and solemn denunciation of Bourbon rule. While detesting 
disorder and revolution he shows that they were rendered 
inevitable by misgovernment. The glowing picture of the reign 
of Murat makes the Restoration loom all the darker. Colletta's 
work has often been compared to Tacitus, whose lofty invective 
he strove to reproduce. Such a book could not be published 
in Italy ; but the Geneva edition found its way back across the 
Alps, and extracts were published and widely read. 

In Italy as in England and France interest in the past was 
to a large extent created by the novel and the drama. The i 
' Promessi Sposi/ published in 1827, rested on a serious study of 
Lombardy in the seventeenth century ; and though Manzoni 
took care that the Church should appear to advantage, the pic- 
ture of the life and thought of the time was sufficiently accurate. 
The greatest of Italian historical novels was the parent of a large 
family. Niccolini glorified the Sicilian Vespers in 'John of 
Prceida,' and attacked the Papacy in 'Arnold of Brescia.' 
Of a similar type were the ' Fieramosca ' and ' Niccolo de Lapi ' 
of Cesare Balbo. The plays, novels and poems produced in rich 
profusion during the second quarter of the century did much 
to stimulate the pride in national development which in due 
time issued in the serious study of Italian history. The first 
of such works was the vast compilation of Troya 3 on the early 
Middle Ages. The Neapolitan scholar made prolonged researches 
in the archives of Monte Cassino and other monasteries. The 
first part, devoted to the barbarians before the fall of the Western 

1 There is an excellent account of Colletta in Luchaire, Essai sur 
V Evolution intellectuelle de I'ltalie, 1815-30, pp. 198-214, 1906. 

2 See Majocchi, Troya, 1876 ; and Marc Monnier, L' Italie, est-elle la 
terre des morts ? ch. xi., i860. 

2 F 2 



436 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. Empire, served as an introduction, and he only lived to bring 
XXII the second part down to Alboin. Though ' Italy in the Middle 
Ages ' remained a vast torso, it is of considerable importance 
in the development of Italian studies. No one had examined 
Italian archives so thoroughly since Muratori, and his great 
collection of documents made a history of the Lombard King- 
dom possible. ' My vocation,' he wrote to a friend, ' is to 
recount the facts — a humble sort of history, not worthy of Vico 
and Herder.' This modest ambition, which aimed neither at \ 
philosophy nor art, did not hinder the expression of his views. 
He exhibited the Lombards as barbarians and tyrants, and the 
Popes as the guardians of Roman law, the Latin language and 
Christian civilisation. The book pointed to the resurrection 
of Italy through the Vatican. 

Troya's attitude towards history was shared by his fellow 
Neapolitan, the famous Abbot of Monte Cassino, who welcomed 
Pertz and Mommsen, Renan and Gregorovius to his library 
on the mountain top. Tosti l won reputation by his history 
of the monastery over which he presided, and his study of 
Boniface VIII defended the great Ultramontane as a champion 
of humanity and of Italy. He glorified the Church as re- 
presenting mind against force, and behind the Papacy and the 
Guelfs he saw democracy and nationality. In 1848 appeared 
the ' Lombard League,' written in the months preceding the 
revolution. The book, significantly dedicated to Pius IX, 
displayed the Pope at the head of Italy in opposition to the 
invader. ' I lay these chapters at your feet as a sacred thing. 
Give us back the standard of Alexander III. The hour has 
struck, humanity awaits you.' Tosti was an uncompromising 
Guelf. The Italian republics reached a height of civilisation 
denied to the monarchies of other lands. Italy belonged to her 
citizens, other countries to their rulers. With these ideas Tosti 
welcomed the year of revolutions ; but the reaction was a bitter 
disappointment. Monte Cassino was occupied by the military, 
and its Abbot fled. The dream that the Papacy made for 
liberty and independence was shattered by French bayonets. 

A conception of Italian history which agreed in some respects 
with that of Tosti was held by a far more brilliant writer. 
Ferrari 3 left his country in 1840, and wrote his chief work in 
French. ' The Revolutions of Italy,' published in 1858, con- 
tained an eloquent survey from the fall of the Western Empire 

1 See Renan, Essais de Morale et de Critique, 1859. 

2 See Renan's essay, ' Les Revolutions d'ltalie,' in Essais de Morale et 
de Critique, 1859.. 



MINOR COUNTRIES 437 

to the collapse of the Florentine Republic in 1530. Every CHAP, 
writer, he declared, sought some unifying principle, some in the XXII 
Papacy, others in the cities. In truth the contending factions 
were Guelfs or Ghibellines under different names. Thus the 
7,200 revolutions and the 700 massacres which took place 
between 1000 and 1500 were only the struggles of two parties. 
Pope and Emperor were mere symbols. His volumes suggest 
that the maze of bloodshed and confusion which makes up 
Italian history was really fruitful. Italians themselves, he 
affirms, never wished to exchange this feverish life for one of 
repose ; for this perpetual effervescence was the condition of 
their creative achievements. While Sismondi lamented the 
disorders as the abuse of his adored liberty, Ferrari crowned 
them with roses. His book lacks accuracy of detail and sobriety 
of judgment ; but it is the most brilliant reconstruction of the 
psychology of Italian city life ever attempted. 

The greatest of South Italian historians was the Sicilian 
Amari, 1 whose first success was mainly due to the political 
suggestions of his work. His ' History of the Sicilian Vespers,' 
published in 1842, narrated the revolt in minute detail ; but 
despite its thousand pages its author sprang into fame. The 
work passed through eight editions in his lifetime, and was 
translated into several languages. While recording the expul- 
sion of the French, he and his readers were thinking of the 
Neapolitan Bourbons. The book was a scholarly study, and 
the criticism of sources unusually thorough ; but its subject 
and its success made it appear a danger. Amari was dis- 
missed from his office and summoned to Naples ; but he 
thought Paris would be safer. He returned to Palermo to 
take office in the Provisional Government of 1848, but on 
the collapse of the constitutional movement once more sought 
refuge abroad. He occupied his exile by researches among the 
Arabic manuscripts in the Paris libraries. The ' Mussulmans 
in Sicily ' is perhaps the greatest historical achievement of 
modern Italy. It lit up a dark corner of the Middle Ages and 
filled the gap between Roman and Norman Sicily. Returning 
to his native island after the expedition of the Thousand, he 
served for some years as Minister of Education to the new 
Kingdom and died at the age of eighty-three. 

While a few isolated scholars practised their trade in the 
South under discouraging circumstances, the northern States 

1 See Tommasini, Scritti di Storia e Critica, 1891 ; Derenbourg, Opus- 
cules d'un Arabisant, 1905 ; Ancona, in Carteggio di Amari, vol. ii., 1896 ; 
and the sumptuous volumes, Centenario delta nascita di Amari, 1910. 



438 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, witnessed a more fruitful activity. The most influential historians 
XXII were found in Piedmont, the premier State, where historical 
studies were encouraged under Charles Albert. Though not 
the most erudite of scholars the first and most popular was 
Cesare Balbo, 1 who began his literary life with historical dramas 
and novels. His political activity being rewarded by banish- 
ment he settled in Paris, where he employed his leisure on a 
history of Italy, two volumes of which were published in 1830. 
Many years later he confessed that it had been a dream of his 
youth to write a history of his country ; but his narrative, like 
that of Troya, only reached the end of the Lombards. Yet, 
though scarcely more than a chronicle of wars and invasions, 
it was welcomed as the first Italian summary of the early fortunes 
of Italy, and the strong national feeling was some compensation 
for the lack of higher qualities. His ' Summary of Italian 
History,' rapidly written for a Turin encyclopaedia in 1845, 
obtained even greater popularity. It was beyond everything a 
contribution to the education of the national consciousness. Its 
moral was that happiness depended on independence, and that 
foreign rule was disastrous to a nation's soul. Like Troya and 
Tosti, Balbo pictured the Church as a bulwark of national in- 
dependence, but at the same time drew attention to the services 
of the House of Savoy. Among other Piedmontese scholars who 
won national fame were Count Sclopis, author of a history of 
Italian Legislation which is still indispensable, and Coppi, 3 who 
devoted his life to a continuation of the Annals of Muratori. 
But the work of the greatest permanent value produced in Italy 
during the first half of the nineteenth century was Count Litta's 
' Famiglie Celebri,' the first part of which, devoted to the Sforza, 
appeared in 1819. 3 Before his death in 1852 he had completed 
over one hundred noble families, among them the Visconti, 
the Este, the Medici, the Gonzaga and the Bentivoglio. The 
work received a warm welcome from European scholars. Before 
Litta Italian family history was a maze of forgeries. Charles 
Albert was angered by the exposure of the failings of his royal 
predecessors, and the historian was harassed by the Austrian 
and Piedmontese censorship. 

Belonging to the same school of liberal Catholicism as Balbo, 
Cesare Cantu 4 played a similar part in Lombardy. His import- 
ance, however, extends far beyond the frontiers of his province, 

1 See Reumont, Zeitgenossen, vol. L, 1862. 

2 For excellent sketches see Reumont, Biographische Denkbldtter ) 1878. 

3 See Reumont, Zeitgenossen, vol. ii., 1862.1 

i See Tabarrini, Studi di Critica storica, 1876. 



MINOR COUNTRIES 439 

for no one wrote so much or took such a large share in instructing CHAP. 
Italians in their history. His ' Margherita Pusterla,' an historical XXII 
novel of the fourteenth century, won immense popularity, and his 
study of Lombardy in the seventeenth century, designed as a 
commentary on the ' Promessi Sposi,' received the assistance of 
Manzoni. In 1830 he began a ' History of the World/ which 
filled twenty volumes. It was from this vast work, repeatedly 
revised, that generations of Italian readers derived the bulk 
of their historical knowledge. The second great task of his life 
was a complete history of Italy, which traced the fortunes of the 
peninsula in a dozen volumes from the foundation of Rome to 
the Crimean War. The survey of religion and literature, economic 
development and social life gave it a value of its own. Cantu 
was neither a great scholar nor an artist. He was prolix and 
superficial, and there is little insight into the process of historic 
growth ; but he possessed unusual talent for popularisation. 

During the decades that followed the fall of Napoleon 
Florence was the intellectual capital of Italy. The Government 
of Tuscany, like its fellows, was hostile to liberty of thought ; 
but the police were less active and the censorship less galling. 
Among her citizens was the man who by knowledge, zeal and 
wealth contributed more to Italian historical studies than any 
of his countrymen. Like Balbo and Cantu, Count Capponi l 
belonged to the school of liberal Catholicism. When in England 
he had been struck by the importance of the great reviews, and 
he dreamed of an Italian journal on the model of the Edinburgh. 
His plan was realised with the assistance of Vieusseux, a cultured 
Genevese who had settled in Florence. Though the censorship 
compelled the editor to confine the review in the main to literary 
topics, the Antologia, which began to appear in 1821, became 
a rallying-point for Italian scholarship. Twenty years later 
a still more important step was taken by the same two men 
in the foundation of the Archivio Storico Italiano. At first 
serving chiefly for the publication of documents it quickly became 
a true historical review, and has survived to witness the birth 
of a number of regional journals. Capponi's influence was also 
exercised in his personal relations to students. He was for 
half a century the Tuscan Maecenas, and the Palazzo Capponi 
was a meeting-point for foreign as well as native scholars. 
Though a loyal subject of the Grand Duke and a champion of 
Italian federation under the Pope, he was too tolerant to quarrel 
with those who urged a bolder solution. There is no more 
attractive figure in Italian scholarship than the Count who, 
1 See Reumont's admirable biography, Gino Capponi, 1880. 



440 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, despite the blindness which overtook him in middle life, never 
XXII lost his zest for study. His self-imposed life-work was the early 
history of his native city and State. He accumulated a great 
body of material and worked at intervals at his task ; but he 
committed the fatal mistake of delaying publication. When it 
appeared in 1875 it failed to satisfy the expectations which had 
been aroused. The early chapters are thus of little merit ; but 
from the middle of the fourteenth century to the fall of the 
Republic it possesses considerable value. Like Balbo and 
Cantu, Capponi displays throughout strong Guelf sympathies. 

For many years the history of Venice was studied, not only 
in Europe but in Italy itself, in the pages of Dam. But two 
scholars were at work in the city when his volumes appeared 
who laid the foundations of a far deeper insight. In 1824 was 
published the first volume of the Venetian Inscriptions to 
which Cicogna T devoted a long and laborious life ; and it was 
owing to such researches that it became possible to supersede 
Daru. Samuel Romanin, 2 a Jew of Trieste, migrated to Venice 
in 1821, and after years of research published his ' Storia 
documentata di Venezia ' in ten volumes, 1853-61. But the 
work was valuable for its judgment no less than its new material, 
and disproved many of Daru's charges. It is in the closing act 
of the drama that the two historians differ most widely. While 
the Frenchman traced the fall of the State to irrevocable 
decadence, Romanin contended that it only yielded to irresistible 
force. But the work is by no means a patriotic apologia, and 
it has never been superseded. 

Of the generation whose studies synchronised with or followed 
the creation of the Italian Kingdom by far the most distinguished 
is Villari. 3 Born in Naples in 1827 he migrated to Tuscany in 
1849, and found his life-work in Florence. For ten years he 
laboured at the biography of Savonarola, which was to bring 
him European fame, and gave the first detailed study of the 
prophet based on the examination of his writings and letters. 
Warmed by a fervent admiration for its hero, the book im- 
mediately became a national favourite. He never wavered in 
his belief that the great preacher was essentially Catholic, that 
he had no desire to subject the world to the Church, and that he 
was one of the most glorious of Italy's thinkers, heroes, and 
martyrs. The ' Life of Machiavelli ' was a larger and still 
more important work. ' When Machiavelli's object is achieved/ 

1 See Reumont, Biographische Denkblatter, 1878. 

2 See the ' Necrologia ' by Polidori in the tenth volume. 

3 See Baldasseroni, Pasquale Villari, 1907. 



MINOR COUNTRIES 441 

wrote Macaulay in 1827, ' his tomb and name will be reverenced.' CHAP. 
The prophecy had come true. As a citizen of united Italy, Villari XXII 
looks back with gratitude to one of her prophets. He discovered 
the unity of his writings in an overmastering desire to see his 
country united and free from foreign domination. The work, 
though its standpoint was not altogether new, came as a 
challenge. Capponi had recently denounced the author of ' The 
Prince,' and foreign scholars pilloried him as the type of 
Italian deceit fulness. Villari made a fair judgment possible 
by reconstructing the historical background. The scholarly 
volumes of Tommasini were to confirm the favourable verdict. 
The third of Villari' s important historical works, the ' Researches 
on the First Two Centuries of the History of Florence, ' appeared 
in 1893, and was largely rewritten in 1904. While possessing a 
certain unity the book is not a narrative but a series of essays, 
concluding with a picture of Florence in the time of Dante. 
Though less popular than his biographies, it won favour by its 
solid scholarship. The love of his adopted city occasionally 
breaks through the reserve of the scholar. ' In the darkness of 
the Middle x\ges Florence appeared as a little point of electric 
light, which illuminated the world.' After completing his three 
works of research Villari devoted himself to popular narratives 
of mediaeval Italy. His essays and lectures on history, literature 
and art have been gathered into volumes which reveal the 
breadth of his sympathies. Alone of Italian historians of 
the nineteenth century he has gained not only a European 
reputation but a European public. 

Each decade witnesses an increasing number of earnest 
historical students. A superb critical edition of the sources of 
mediaeval history is being issued by the Historical Institute. 
The interminable diary of Sanuto has been edited by a group 
of Venetian scholars. Isidoro del Lungo replied to Scheffer- 
Boichorst's onslaught on Dino Campagni. De Leva traced 
the activity of Charles V in Italy, Masi specialised in the 
eighteenth century, Franchetti reconstructed the era of the 
French Revolution in Italy, and Molmenti has painted sparkling 
pictures of Venetian life. Ricotti and Carutti explored the 
diplomacy of Savoy. Baron Lumbroso has enlisted under the 
banner of Napoleon. Bianchi has reconstructed the history of 
European diplomacy in Italy during the nineteenth century from 
the archives of Turin. Luzio has discussed the problems of the 
Risorgimento , and De Cesare has written with authority on the 
fall of the Neapolitan Kingdom. Chiala's edition of Cavour's 
correspondence is a worthy tribute to the founder of united Italy. 



442 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. The first historical work produced in Spain in the nineteenth 

XXII century owed its fame less to its merits than to its subject. 
Llorente's l ' History of the Inquisition ' possesses the piquant 
interest of a revelation. The secretary to the Holy Office in 
Madrid took advantage of the expulsion of the Bourbons and 
the temporary suppression of the tribunal to compile its history 
with the aid of official documents. The book, which appeared 
in French in 1817 and shortly after in the original, was translated 
into several languages and increased the hatred with which 
the Inquisition was viewed in Protestant and liberal Europe ; 
but the use of material is arbitrary, and it must be used with 
extreme caution. Of scarcely less celebrity was Conde's 
' History of the Arabs in Spain.' In an age when a knowledge 
of Arabic was rare, Conde 3 was believed to possess the key. 
Appointed librarian at Madrid by Joseph Bonaparte, the 
historian retired with the French to Paris, only returning in 
1819 to die. His work appeared immediately after his death, 
was translated into several languages, and remained canonical 
for a generation. The first blow at his authority was struck by 
Pascual de Gayangos in his sumptuous edition of El Makkari's 
Mohammedan Dynasties. Though declaring Conde's work the 
foundation of current knowledge, he pronounced it to be 
blundering and incoherent. But it was not till the appearance 
of Dozy's ' Recherches sur l'histoire politique et litteraire de 
1'Espagne ' in 1849 that it proved to be a house built upon sand. 
Conde, declared the Leyden scholar, knew little more of Arabic 
than the alphabet. ' With incomparable impudence he forges 
dates by hundreds and invents facts by thousands, while pre- 
tending to translate. It would be easier to cleanse the stables 
of Augeas than to correct all the faults and refute all the lies.' 
In his ' Recherches ' and in the ' History of the Spanish Mussul- 
mans ' which followed it, the great Dutch Arabist swept away 
the fog of monkish legends, and rendered possible a critical 
history of mediaeval Spain. His most resounding achievement 
was to recover the real character and career of the Cid. 

The early years of the Restoration also witnessed the first 
serious studies of the heroic age of the Spanish Monarchy. 
Clemencin explored the reign of Isabella, and Navarrete collected 
the documents relating to Columbus and his successors. The 
Royal Academy of History, at the instigation of Navarrete, 
began the great ' Coleccion de documentos ineditos ' which has 

1 See the hostile analysis in Hefele, Ximenes, ch. xviii., 1844. Lea 
has also exposed his reckless abuse of figures. 

2 See the criticisms in Gayangos and Dozy. 



MINOR COUNTRIES 443 

now passed its hundredth volume. None of the minor countries CHAP, 
can boast such a comprehensive work or one begun so early. XXII 
With the publication of the ' Documentos ' scholars began to 
realise the incalculable importance of the national treasure- 
house at Simancas,i from which so many of its contents were 
drawn. In the eighteenth century Robertson had been refused 
permission to undertake researches for his ' Conquest of America.' 
The exclusion of foreigners was continued after the Napoleonic 
wars, and it was not till 1843 that Gachard entered the little 
village near Valladolid to copy the correspondence of Philip II. 
He was followed by a few other foreign scholars, all of whom 
bitterly complained of the hardships involved. Bergenroth 
and Maurenbrecher arrived from Germany, Gindely from 
Bohemia, De Leva from Italy, Froude and Gardiner from England. 
The most zealous of foreign students, Bergenroth, spent the 
best part of ten years in the archives, undermined his health 
and died of fever. Among the small number of Spanish pilgrims 
to the shrine was Lafuente, 2 author of the first detailed and 
complete history of Spain. His work, appearing in thirty 
volumes between 1850 and 1867, occupies the position of the 
national history held in France by Henri Martin, and glorifies 
the Monarchy and the Church. The volumes on the Middle 
Ages were weak and uncritical. While rejecting many of the 
absurdities of the old chronicles, he is not courageous enough 
to reject them all. The style is prolix, like that of most South 
European historians, but easy and flowing. Every part of 
the story has been modified by new discoveries, and the book is 
now superseded by the ' Historia General,' written by members 
of the Academy of History under the guidance of Canovas, 
which began to appear in 1892. The famous Conservative 
leader was a profound student, and his volumes on Philip IV 
revealed his capacity both for research and narrative. Perhaps 
the most notable item of the collection is the richly documented 
work of Danvila y Collado on the reforming King Charles III. 
The volumes, though written by specialists, aim at popular 
treatment and are liberally illustrated. 

The Academy History is by far the most important effort 
of Spanish historiography ; but other valuable works have been 
produced. 3 Altamira, known to English readers as a contributor 

1 There is a good account of the history of the archives in Revue 
Historique, vol. xcvi. Cp. Cartwright, Gustave Bergenroth, 1870. The 
archives are to be transferred to Seville. 

- See the detailed biography in vol. xxx. of the Historia general de Espana. 

3 See Revue de Synthase historique, vols. vi. and ix. 



444 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, to the ' Cambridge Modern History,' has written by far the best 
XXII summary in any language of the chequered story of Spanish 
civilisation. Danvila y Collado has composed an exhaustive 
treatise on the Civil Power which, while emphasising legislation 
and administration, is scarcely less than a history of Spain 
from Ferdinand and Isabella to the Constitution of 1812. The 
monographs of Rodriguez Villa on the sixteenth century are on 
a level with the best European scholarship. The fortunes of the 
Spanish navy have been exhaustively investigated by Fernan- 
dez Duro, whose work on the Armada revealed to the world the 
Spanish side of the expedition. The greatest of Spanish scholars, 
Menendez y Pelayo, whose recent death at the age of fifty-six 
was an irreparable loss to European scholarship, only dealt 
indirectly with history in the narrower sense of the term ; but 
his writings have thrown more light on the development of the 
Spanish mind than those of any other writer, native or foreign. 
His massive monograph on the Spanish heretics, published when 
he was only twenty-six, told a painful story. His histories of 
Science and /Esthetic Ideas in Spain and his innumerable literary 
essays touch the national life at many points. The reading public 
is small, and the average citizen prefers to swallow history in a 
diluted form. No survey of the peninsula could omit to mention 
the prodigious fortune of the historical novels of Perez Galdos, 
the Walter Scott of Spain. His ' National Episodes ' relate the 
vicissitudes of the country from the battle of Trafalgar in two 
score volumes, and offer a wonderfully living picture of the 
revolt against Napoleon, the despotism of Ferdinand VII and 
the tragedies of the Carlist wars. 

Nowhere is the contrast between past and present more poig- 
nant than in Portugal, 1 and in no country is the cult of the past 
less discriminating. The first scholarly history was written by 
Schafer for the Heeren-Ukert series ; but as the Portuguese did 
not understand German, it passed unnoticed. With the publica- 
tion of the work of Herculano da Carvalho in 1846-9 serious 
historical studies began. Though the four volumes covered 
scarcely more than a century, three editions were quickly 
demanded ; but the book created indignation as well as interest. 
Well acquainted with French and German scholarship, he ac- 
cepted the critical results of Schafer and went beyond them. He 
boldly declared in his preface that patriotism was a bad counsellor 
for historians. In this critical spirit he scraped off the legendary 
gilding. Some venerable fables he did not even deign to mention. 

1 See Dollinger, Akademische Reden, vol. ii., 1889, and Baxmann in 
Historische Zeitschrift, vol. ix. 



MINOR COUNTRIES 445 

He showed that Portuguese history was less heroic, less glorious, CHAP, 
less unique than had been believed, and wounded his compatriots XXII 
in their tenderest spot by emphasising the large admixture of 
Moorish blood. The few scholars of whom Portugal could boast 
welcomed the book as an honest attempt to reach the truth ; 
but the author was assailed by the majority of his critics as a 
traitor, a blasphemer and a Lutheran, who had been bought 
by foreign enemies. He bitterly declared that he ought to have 
shown every Portuguese to be worth three Spaniards and two 
Frenchmen, and to have accepted the popular legends and pious 
falsehoods of old women. So disgusted was he by the ignorant 
bigotry of his countrymen that he left his work a fragment. 

On resolving to discontinue his history he turned to a subject 
scarcely less inflammable. His massive monograph on the 
foundation of the Inquisition in Portugal was based throughout 
on unused acts and correspondence. Though more limited in 
scope and less famous than the work of Llorente, it is a far more 
valuable and scholarly performance. Southey had once said 
that the Portuguese Inquisition was an association to burn 
people whose property was coveted. This tremendous indict- 
ment was confirmed by the researches of Herculano, who called 
his story a drama of crimes. The reception of his second work 
was so hostile that he gave up historical composition and turned 
to the historical novel. ' Eurich,' a tale of the destruction of the 
Visigothic Kingdom by the Moors, was translated into German 
by Heine and appeared in an abridged form in French. Hercu- 
lano found some compensation for the complacent ignorance of 
the majority of his countrymen in the devotion and admiration 
of his friends and pupils. Among the latter the most distin- 
guished was Rebello da Silva, whose work on the era of Spanish 
rule avoided a collision with patriotic prejudices. 



Ill 

In Switzerland, 1 as in Portugal, serious investigation was 
impossible till the haze of legend had been dispersed and the 
national traditions subjected to a cool and critical inquiry. The 
work of iconoclasm was accomplished by Kopp, 3 an ardent 
patriot and a pious Catholic. A teacher of history at Lucerne 
he edited a selection of passages from Johannes von M tiller for 
schools, and his enthusiastic tribute to the ' immortal ' work 

1 See G. von Wyss, Geschichte dev Historiographie in der Schweiz, 1895. 

2 See Lutolf, /. E. Kopp, 3 vols,, 1868. 



446 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, showed that he was troubled by no doubts. His conversion 
XXII began when he undertook to write a memorial sketch for the 
fifth centenary of Lucerne's entrance into the federation. 
Turning to the archives he discovered that the stories of Tschudi, 
which earlier scholars had doubted but Miiiler had naively copied 
into his pages, were for the most part late inventions. The 
determination to accept no incident for which early testimony 
was not forthcoming revolutionised Swiss history. His next 
task was to publish a volume of documents in 1835. The new 
version, from which Gessler and Tell disappeared, was received 
with consternation ; but the critical insight displayed in the 
volume brought fame and friendships beyond the frontier. 
He refused the flattering invitation to write a complete history 
for the series of Heeren and Ukert ; but encouraged by friends 
he determined to narrate the beginnings of the confederation. 
The familiar anecdotes of Austrian tyranny and cruelty were 
dismissed as legends, and Austrians were delighted to read a 
vindication of Rudolf of Hapsburg. An historian who was so 
little of a ' patriot ' naturally found most appreciation outside his 
country ; but though his merits were generally recognised, he 
was frankly unreadable. Waitz, the greatest of medisevalists, 
and Bohmer, the most intimate of his friends, equally lamented 
that a work of such importance should be so badly written. 
Switzerland now reads her history not in his pages but in those 
of Dandliker and Dierauer, who incorporated his results. The 
critical study of the Middle Ages was carried forward by Meyer 
von Knonau and Wyss. Roget's detailed monograph on Geneva 
during the Reformation constituted a notable advance on the 
headlong confessionalism of d'Aubigne. Stahelin wrote the 
first adequate life of Calvin. Oechsli is now engaged on an 
exhaustive history since the French invasion of 1798. Light has 
been thrown on the evolution of culture by Henne-am-Rhyn. 
Among the influences which have helped to create interest are 
the scholarly novels of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. 

The year 1830, which witnessed the birth of an independent 
Belgium, ushered in a period of eager historical research and pro- 
duction. 1 Belgian historians as a rule have distinguished them- 
selves rather by the publication of materials than by brilliant 
narratives. Wauters began his career with a history of Brussels, 
of which he was archivist, and devoted the last half of his long 
life to a vast chronological coUection of Charters illustrating the 
history of Belgium. The greatest amount of attention has been 

1 See Potvin, Cinquante Ans de Liberie, vol. iv., 1882, and Biographie 
Nationale de Belgique, 



MINOR COUNTRIES 447 

paid to the critical sixteenth century. It was to that epoch that CHAP. 
Gachard, the greatest of Belgian scholars, devoted almost the XXII 
whole of his long life. Born in France he came as a youth to 
Belgium, and in 1831 was appointed chief archivist of the new 
Kingdom. His edition of the correspondence of William the 
Silent and of Philip II made a study of the great rivals possible. 
Though his main occupation was to discover and edit materials, 
he wrote a study of Don Carlos, a history of Belgium in the 
eighteenth century, and several volumes of essays. More 
popular but far less critical was Kervyn de Lettenhove, whose 
' History of Flanders ' is one of the most considerable narrative 
works that Belgium has produced. In his patriotic enthusiasm 
he plunges headlong into the strife between France and the 
Communes. His lack of judgment appears even more clearly 
in his most celebrated work, ' Les Huguenots et les Gueux.' 
Written from the standpoint of militant Catholicism, the book 
turns Motley's picture upside down. He detests William the 
Silent and reviles his supporters. The tone is too violent to 
command confidence ; but he offers a vast amount of new 
material from foreign as well as Belgian archives, and his spirited 
attack on the Protestant tradition is often suggestive. Henne 
related the Belgian chapters of the reign of Charles V in a vast 
work loaded with precious documents. Van Praet's studies of 
European rulers and statesmen from Charles V to the French 
Revolution are among the best historical works that Belgium has 
produced. The successful revolt of 1830 is the chosen domain of 
Juste, whose numerous monographs on the ' Founders of the 
Belgian Monarchy ' possess enduring value owing to his use of the 
private papers of King Leopold, Stockmar, Van de Weyer and 
other statesmen to whom the country owes its independence. 
During the last generation an historical school employing the 
expert methods of French and German Universities has arisen. 
Vanderkindere at Brussels and Kurth at Liege inspired their 
pupils with their own passion for the Middle Ages ; while at Ghent 
Fredericq, the author of an invaluable history of the Inquisition 
in Belgium, has exerted a still wider influence. It is owing to 
the devoted labours of two generations of scholars that Pirenne 
has been able to write a critical history of his country which 
supersedes all earlier attempts. 

The country of Grotius, Hoofd and Wagenaar has devoted 
close attention to its glorious history. The place occupied in 
Belgium by Gachard is filled in Holland by Groen van Prinsterer, 
statesman and student, whose life was largely devoted to the 
publication of the archives of the House of Orange. A calvinist 



448 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, and an ardent champion of the dynasty, Groen's judgments are 
XXI1 not always beyond cavil ; l but his introductions and elucidations 
are a real contribution to history. Vreede investigated the 
foreign policy of his country, and his detailed study of the external 
relations of the Batavian Republic is one of the most important 
monographs in the national literature. A far greater name is 
Fruin, 2 the Ranke of Holland. His fame would have been wider 
had he written a work of large dimensions ; but it may be doubted 
whether it would have been so useful as the mass of monographs 
in which he recorded his results. His most celebrated work, 
' Ten Years of the Eighty Years War,' published in 1857, procured 
him the Chair of Dutch History at Leyden created in i860. Alike 
in scholarship, judgment and style this study of the critical period 
following the death of William the Silent represents the most 
perfect historical work that Holland has produced. Ranging 
more particularly over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 
his collected essays and investigations constitute the most 
trustworthy guide to the glorious period of Dutch history. 
Fruin 's successor at Leyden was Blok, the most eminent of Dutch 
historians since the death of his master. His ' History of the 
Dutch People ' offers the first comprehensive and critical survey of 
national development, and corresponds roughly to Green's larger 
' History of the English People.' Written in an agreeable style 
it at once took its place as the national history, and, alone of Dutch 
historical works, has received the honour of an English and 
German translation. Every aspect of the national life — 
political and social, religious and literary, industrial and com- 
mercial — receives attention, and from time to time the author 
halts to survey the situation as a whole. The concluding volume, 
describing the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, offers a 
welcome picture of a little known chapter in modern history. 

The founder of Danish 8 historical scholarship was Allen, the 
author of the first modern history of Denmark, a work which, in 
a French translation, was for long the sole guide of foreign 
students. While his survey was necessarily rather a summary 
of known facts, his ' History of the Three Northern Kingdoms, 
1497-1536,' was the fruit of prolonged research. Of equal 
importance was the monograph on the first Oldenbourg Kings of 
Paludan-Muller, the brother of the poet. The earlier history 

1 There is a brief sketch of Groen in Mackay, Religious Thought in 
Holland, Lecture 1, 1911. 

2 See the excellent appreciations of Blok, Verspreide Studien, 1903, and 
Rackfahl, Hist. Zeitschrift, vol. xcviii. 

3 See Steenstrup, Histories krivninger i Danmark i det igde Aarhundrede, 
1889. 



MINOR COUNTRIES 



449 



of Scandinavia was the chosen theme of Worsaae. Beginning CHAP, 
with the primeval antiquities of Denmark, he traced the journeys XXII 
of the Norsemen to England, Scotland and Ireland, and followed 
with a survey of the Danish conquest of England and Normandy. 
His works, translated into English and German, were for a 
generation the chief source of knowledge for the Vikings, and 
his popular and richly illustrated writings created a taste for 
Scandinavian antiquities. Building on his foundations but 
employing more critical methods, Steenstrup published his 
massive work on the Norsemen, the later volumes of which 
revealed the existence of more numerous traces of Scandinavian 
influence in England than had been generally realised. The 
story of the Danes may now be read in the co-operative work 
which began to appear in 1897, to which Steenstrup, Fridericia, 
Holm and other tried scholars have contributed. 

The father of historical study in Sweden was Geijer, 1 professor 
and poet, politician and economist. Beginning his career with 
an edition of the Swedish chronicles and dissertations on Swedish 
antiquities, he published the first comprehensive history of his 
country in 1832. Passing lightly over the Middle Ages the 
narrative broadens with Gustavus Vasa, relates the career of 
Gustavus Adolphus in detail, and closes with the abdication of his 
daughter Christina. Written for the Heeren and Ukert series, 
the book became a national possession and was translated into 
several languages. It was at once a summary of established 
facts and an important addition to knowledge. The book was 
continued by Carlson, who added a fifth and sixth volume, but 
died before he had completed the reign of Charles XII. The 
third member of the triumvirate was Fryxell, the Swedish 
Freytag, who did more to popularise the study than any other 
writer. His ' Stories from Swedish History ' began to appear in 
1823, the forty-sixth part being completed more than half a 
century later. The work was attractively written and won 
immense popularity. Addressed to the youth of Sweden it 
became more scholarly and ambitious as it advanced, and 
developed into something like a history of the nation. His lives 
of Gustavus Adolphus and Charles XII, resting on diligent study 
of the archives, gained special favour. More recently Malm- 
strom has investigated the half century between Charles XII and 
Gustavus III with infinite care. The first modern Norwegian 
historian was Keyser, whose writings and lectures at Christiania 
created an interest in the early and mediaeval history of Scandi- 
navia. The greatest of his pupils, Munch, helped his master to 

1 See Nielsen, Erik Geijer, 1902. 

2 g 



450 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, publish the old. Norwegian laws, and himself brought many 
XXII sources to light. His principal work, the most important 
monument of Norwegian studies, was a ' History of the Norse 
People to the Union with Denmark,' in which society and 
culture receive not less attention than war and statecraft. His 
researches were not confined to his own country, and it was while 
studying manuscripts in Rome that he died. A master of 
Teutonic philology whose competence was recognised by Grimm, 
his lectures on language, mythology and history created a wide- 
spread interest in Norse civilisation. 



IV 

The first national historian of Russia was Karamsin. 1 Living 
in the age of romanticism, in Russian history he found romance 
in plenty. Under Catherine and Paul he had been a liberal and 
something of a cosmopolitan ; but he came to regard Russia as a 
world apart, independent of and superior to the countries of the 
West. It was in this Slavophil spirit that he set to work, toning 
down the barbarism and throwing the warm colours of fancy 
around his narrative. The keynote of the coming work was 
struck by a Memoir on ' Ancient and Modern Russia,' glorifying 
the principles of autocracy and combating constitutional theories. 
The book was among the influences that weaned Alexander I 
from his liberalism and led to the fall of Speranski. The ' History 
of Russia ' appeared in twelve volumes between 1816 and 1829, 
and had reached the coming of the Romanoffs when the author 
died. It was the first detailed narrative in the Russian language. 
Unable to deny the long periods of inertia, he claims them as a 
valuable element ensuring tranquil development. He depicts 
the early princes as absolute rulers, and presents Ivan III, who 
freed Russia from the Tartars, as the ideal monarch. The Church 
is the strength of the throne. ' Faith is one of the essential forces 
of the State.' Pushkin described Karamsin as the Columbus of 
ancient Russia, and Soloviev praised the book as a magnificent 
poem to the glory of the State. It is true that he steered his 
course over an almost uncharted sea ; but neither in scholarship 
nor judgment does it reach a high standard. He had no critical 
instincts, and he accepted his authorities without challenge. The 
novelist often peeps through the vizor of the historian. 

1 Karamsin is discussed in the histories of Russian literature by 
Reinholdt and Waliszewski, and in Pypin, Die geistigen Bewegungen 
Russlands in der ersten Hdlfte des igten Jahrhunderts, ch. iv., 1894. 



MINOR COUNTRIES 451 

The second great name is Soloviev, 1 whose history superseded CHAP. 
Karamsin. The first volume appeared in 1851, and a further XXII 
instalment followed every year. At his death in 1880 the 
twenty-ninth volume was almost ready for press. Karamsin 
had reached 161 1, Soloviev the reign of Catherine II. He made 
careful researches in the archives, and his volumes were an 
addition to as well as a summary of existing knowledge. Though 
filled with a deep reverence for the past, he regarded the craving 
for Western culture as natural and laudable. In reply to Katkov 
and the Moscow Slavophils he maintained that Russians were 
Europeans, and that nothing European could be alien to them. 
Thus he emphasises the necessity of the work of Peter the Great, 
and shows how naturally it grew out of the past. He marks an 
immense advance in his ability to understand and sympathise 
with the ideals of the liberal as well as of the Slavophil. His 
plan was too vast for a single life, and the later volumes are rather 
masses of ore than refined metal. The book is an inexhaustible 
mine of information, not a work of popular appeal. His 
summary of Russian history, issued in 1859 in a single volume, 
enjoyed great popularity, and in a French translation enables 
foreigners to form a rough estimate of its author's merits. 

Of less importance but greater popularity were the writings 
of Kostomarov, the most effective populariser of Russian history, 
whose early interest in politics led to prison and exile. On the 
accession of Alexander II he was pardoned and appointed 
Professor at St. Petersburg ; but he was dismissed when the 
reaction began in 1862. A long array of monographs threw light 
on aspects of Russian life neglected by Karamsin and Soloviev, 
and in 1873 he began a series of biographies which won many 
friends. While Soloviev was a moderate conservative, Kosto- 
marov never concealed his sympathy with free institutions. The 
older historians are virtually superseded by Kluchevsky, who after 
many years of fruitful activity at Moscow was persuaded to revise 
and publish his lectures. Making no effort to rival Soloviev in 
detailed narrative of politics and war, he attempts to reconstruct 
the life of the people and discusses the main problems of national 
development. Masses of material have emerged from the public 
archives, and from those of the Worontzeff and other great 
families. De Martens spent forty years in publishing and 
annotating the treaties concluded with foreign Powers ; and his 
gigantic work has rendered a history of Russian diplomacy 
possible. That synthetic works, utilising the material thus 
accumulated, are rare is partly due to the censorship. Bruckner 

1 See Guerrier's instructive article, Hist. Zeitschrift, vol. xlv. 

2 g 2 



452 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, devoted his life to the eighteenth century, and Waliszewski has 
XXII produced brilliant monographs on the rulers from Ivan the 
Terrible to Paul. The greatest loss which the censure has 
inflicted is the suppression of the larger part of Bilbassoff's 
monumental work on Catherine II. It was rumoured that the 
first volume was mutilated before publication, and the second, 
dealing with the assassination of Peter III, was promptly 
suppressed. With the exception of the vast critical bibliography 
the remaining volumes are still in manuscript. Historical 
studies have also suffered by the ejection or banishment of 
prominent teachers. Vinogradoff has taken refuge at Oxford, 
and Miliukov, deprived of his chair, has entered the arena of 
politics. The leaden obscurantism of the Tsars weighs no less 
heavily on historical scholarship than on every other department 
of national life. 

Polish historians, like those of Bohemia, have laboured 
under the disability of writing subject to the censorship of an 
alien Power. Their trials are illustrated in the career of Lelewel. 1 
As Professor of History at Wilna he aroused the enthusiasm of his 
pupils, and in the crusade against secret societies he lost his post. 
When the Revolution broke out in 1830 he was elected a member 
of the national government. On its failure he fled to Paris and 
thence to Brussels, where he spent the last thirty years of his life. 
His ' Poland in the Middle Ages ' suffered from lack of access 
to the archives, and the ardent democrat found more popular 
influences in early Polish history than had ever existed. None 
the less he remains a striking figure, and his learning and 
patriotism are still gratefully remembered in the land of 
his birth. Next in importance was the Galician Szajnocha. 
Imprisoned as a young man by the Austrian Government for 
patriotic verses, he won fame by his work on the Jagiellos. 
But no historians have contributed so powerfully to the 
awakening of national interest as the patriotic novels of 
Kraszewski and Sienkiewicz. 

Nowhere, except in Bohemia, has the influence of historical 
study been greater than in Greece. The expulsion of the Turks 
left the country free indeed, but poor and ignorant. With this 
gloomy outlook cultured Greeks found comfort in the memory 
of classical civilisation. But at the very moment of emancipation 
Fallmerayer startled the learned world by his denial of the 
continuity of the race. The attack was deeply resented ; and 
Greeks witnessed with delight the rejection of his paradox by 

1 See Nitzschmann's Geschichte der Polnischen Liter atur, and Morfill, 
Poland, ch. xiii. 



MINOR COUNTRIES 453 

Hopf and Finlay, Zinkeisen and Hertzberg. The unbroken CHAP. 
continuity of Greek life was the main principle of the work of XXII 
Paparrigopoulos. His reply to Fallmerayer and other historical 
essays procured him the Chair of Greek History when the 
University of Athens was founded in 1837. In 1865-74 he 
published the history which contained the result of his lifelong 
researches. His survey of classical Greece is only a summary 
of the work of other men ; but with the early Middle Ages the 
book assumes independent value. The treatment of the Slavonic 
colonies in Greece broke new ground. But like other ' national ' 
histories it possesses the faults of an apologia, emphasising the 
culture and heroism of the Greeks and the vices of their oppressors. 
The Professor's message was repeated in the short ' History of 
Greek Civilisation,' which appeared simultaneously in Greek and 
French in 1878. Foreign scholars, he declared, hardly appre- 
ciated the intimate relation of the new to the old Greeks. The 
West had sinned against Greece, and it must now assist the little 
kingdom to embrace all lands where Greek blood predominated. 
While Paparrigopoulos stands out as the spokesman and in- 
terpreter of Greece, useful work has also been accomplished by 
less famous scholars. The elder Tricoupis published a masterly 
narrative of the War of Independence, in which he had himself 
taken part. More recently Sathas has collected a mass of 
material illustrating the Middle Ages. Of living scholars 
Lambros, the distinguished Professor at Athens, has done most to 
popularise and encourage the study of history. Students and 
teachers alike are filled with enthusiasm for the epic traditions 
of their country. ' The exclusively Hellenic character of all 
the features, physical and intellectual, of the present Greeks,' 
declares Bikelas 1 in a characteristic passage, ' is a glorious proof 
of the intensity of our national vitality.' 

1 Seven Essays on Christian Greece, 1890. 



XXIII 



CHAPTER XXIII 

MOMMSEN AND ROMAN STUDIES 



CHAP. Xhe history of Roman studies since the death of Niebuhr is 
largely the record of the activity of a single man. The son 
of a poor but cultured Schleswig pastor, Theodor Mommsen 1 
was the eldest of three brothers, all of whom gained distinction 
in classical research. The study of law at Kiel turned his atten- 
tion to Rome, and his interest in the classical world was increased 
by the lectures of Otto Jahn. His first works, a Latin dissertation 
on Roman Associations and a study of Roman Tribes, won the 
notice of scholars, and are still authoritative. At the age of 
twenty-six he was already a master of his craft. A travelling 
scholarship from the Danish Government, supplemented by 
a small grant from the Berlin Academy, was employed to visit 
Italy ; and the Italian tour played as great a part in his life 
as in that of Ranke and Burckhardt. His headquarters in 
the Eternal City was the Archaeological Institute, 3 founded by 
Bunsen and Gerhard in 1829 ; and with its secretary Henzen, 
who had already begun to collect inscriptions, he formed a close 
friendship. 

In his dissertation on Roman Associations the young scholar 
had expressed a wish for a Corpus of Latin Inscriptions. There 
had been a dozen collections before 1800, all of which contained 
forgeries. 3 The foundation of Latin epigraphy had been laid by 
Marini, whose work on the Fratres Arvales (1795) contained a 
thousand unknown inscriptions. His example was followed by 

1 The fullest account is by Hartmann, Mommsen, 1908. The best 
appreciations are by Neumann, Hist. Zeitschrift, vol. cxii. ; Karst, Hist. 
Vierteljahrschrift, 1904 ; Haverfield, Eng. Hist. Review, Jan. 1904; Camille 
Jullian, Revue historique, vol. lxxxiv. Guilland's essay, in L'Allemagne 
Nouvelle et ses Historiens, 1899, over-emphasises his political ideas. 

2 See Michaelis, Gesch. des deutschen Archdologischen Instituts, 1879. 

3 See Hiibner, Romische Epigraphih, in Iwan Midler's Handbuch. 



MOMMSEN AND ROMAN STUDIES 455 

his pupil Borghesi, 1 who reconstructed the Fasti of the Roman CHAP, 
magistrates. After some correspondence Mommsen visited him XXIII 
in his home at San Marino, and discussed the prospects of a 
Latin Corpus. A beginning had been made largely by private 
effort, but the undertaking was interrupted by the death of 
Kellermann, the first editor. The Berlin Academy thereupon 
invited Otto Jahn to undertake the work, and Jahn asked his 
old pupil to help. But the French Academy had not at this 
time given up the idea of a Corpus, and Borghesi had promised 
his aid. In view of the competition Mommsen resolved to carry 
out an independent work with the Samnite inscriptions, and then, 
on the advice of Borghesi, passed to the Neapolitan Kingdom, 
After prolonged wanderings in the South he revisited San 
Marino before crossing the Alps. When the ' Inscriptions of 
the Neapolitan Kingdom ' appeared in 1852 they were dedicated 
to Borghesi, ' Magistro, Patrono, Amico.' While searching for 
inscriptions he had kept his eyes open for other aspects of anti- 
quity. The chief result of his Italian journey, after the Inscrip- 
tions, was the mastery of ancient dialects. His 'Oscan Studies,' 
followed by his ' Lower Italian Dialects,' were an epoch-making 
contribution to the history and ethnography not less than to 
the languages of pre-Roman Italy, and remained canonical 
till Brugmann. 

Mommsen returned to Kiel in time to take part in the stirring 
events of 1848. A slight injury sustained in a street riot in 
Hamburg prevented him from joining his brothers as volunteers 
against Denmark. But he found compensation in helping to 
edit the Schleswig-Holstein Zeitung, the organ of the Provisional 
Government. The close contact with war and revolution gave him 
an insight into the forces and passions which build up history, 
while his brief experience of journalism developed the incisive 
style to which the ' Roman History ' was to owe much of its fame. 
The failure of the national movement made Holstein too hot for 
him, and he gladly accepted a call to the Chair of Roman Law at 
Leipsic, where he lived in close companionship with Jahn and 
Moritz Haupt. But the arm of reaction was long, and in 185 1 
Beust, the Saxon Prime Minister, dismissed the three scholars 
from their posts. Mommsen accepted an invitation to Zurich, 
where he collected Swiss inscriptions ; but the sphere was too 
small, and he soon moved to Breslau. 

The almost accidental origin of the 'Roman History ' was related 
in a letter to Freytag. ' In my youth I thought of all sorts 
of things, of Roman criminal law, an edition of legal documents, 
1 See the notice in CEuvres, vol. x., 1897. 



456 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, a compendium of the Pandects, but never of historical writing. 

XXIII Invited to give a public lecture while at Leipsic, I delivered an 
address on the Gracchi. Reimer and Hirzel, the publishers, 
were present, and two days later they asked me to write a 
Roman History for their series.' ' It is high time for such a work,' 
he wrote to Henzen ; ' it is more than ever necessary to present 
to a wider circle the results of our researches.' A year later, 
in 1851, he declared that he was weighed down by the end- 
less difficulty of the undertaking. His first plan was to devote 
two volumes to the Republic and a third to the Empire ; but 
he quickly realised that the latter could only be treated when 
the Inscriptions had been collected. The three volumes were 
therefore devoted to the Republic. No other man in Germany 
or in Europe possessed the knowledge to carry out the task with 
success. He obeyed the order to fill his book with results in- 
stead of processes. In Niebuhr the thread of narrative is lost 
in the labjainth of dissertation. In Schwegler every fragment of 
tradition is analysed with meticulous care. Mommsen only asked 
tradition to confirm or illustrate inferences drawn from the survival 
of institutions and usages. In turning away from Niebuhr he 
followed the lead of Rubino, 1 whose studies of the constitution 
had made a profound impression upon him. But while he glides 
rapidly past the problems which occupy other historians, he 
reconstructs in broad strokes the ethnology, institutions and 
social life of early Italy. The fully historical period begins with 
Pyrrhus. The account of Hannibal is less striking than that of 
Arnold, and the picture of the Gracchi is curiously lacking in 
sympathy. He reaches his full stride with Marius and Sulla, 
and portrays the dying struggles of the Republic with incompar- 
able power and brilliancy. 

The ' Roman History ' made Mommsen famous in a day, 
and was quickly translated into every civilised language. 3 
For the first time the modern world was provided with a complete 
survey of the Republic. Its sureness of touch, its many-sided 
knowledge, its throbbing vitality and the Venetian colouring 
of its portraits left an ineffaceable impression on every reader. 
Almost at the same moment Grote and Mommsen brought 
Athens and Rome into the consciousness and culture of the 
modern world. While the public welcomed the book with 
delight and scholars testified to its impeccable erudition, some 
specialists were annoyed at finding old hypotheses rejected 

1 See Niese's article, Allg. Deutsche Biog. 

2 For an English judgment see Freeman's Historical Essays, Second 
Series, 1873. Cp. Carl Peter, Sludien zur Romischen Geschichte, 1863. 



MOMMSEN AND ROMAN STUDIES 457 

and new ones advanced as if they were incontrovertible facts. CHAP. 
Others complained of the lack of tranquillity and dignity. It XXIII 
is indeed the work of a politician and a journalist as well as of 
a scholar. Labienus was a Napoleonic marshal ; Sulla, Don 
Juan ; Cato, Sancho Panza. We read of Junkers and haute 
finance. ' Much might be said about the modern tone,' he 
wrote to Henzen. ' I wanted to bring down the ancients from 
the fantastic pedestal on which they appear into the real world. 
That is why the consul had to become the burgomaster. Perhaps 
I have overdone it ; but my intention was sound enough.' 

A more serious and well-grounded charge was directed 
against the closing volume. There was something like an 
universal outcry against the conception of the protagonists in 
the culminating scene of the drama. During his student years 
he had been powerfully influenced by Drumann's erudite 
biographies of Caesar and his contemporaries. 1 ' Roman 
history,' wrote Drumann, ' shows that republican forms are not 
permanently suited for man, and can only last with pure and 
simple morals. Not against but without my will my book is 
an eulogy of monarchy.' In Drumann we find not only a 
passionate admiration for Caesar but. a sharp attack on Cicero. 
No part of the ' Roman History ' possesses such indestructible 
vitality as that which narrates the deadly struggle of Caesar with 
his enemies ; for Mommsen steps down from his conning-tower 
and mingles in the fray. Pompey, Cicero and Cato are lashed 
as if they were the living chiefs of a hated political faction, 
while his idol dominates the stage, radiant, peerless, irresistible, 
the saviour of society. He has no love for ineffectual angels. 
He censures Pompey for his lack of passion in good or evil. ' He 
had met Ciceros in 1848,' remarks Professor Haverfield, ' who 
talked admirably and acted feebly.' He spoke contemptuously 
of the honest mediocrities of the Senate. Caesar was the man 
of destiny, seeing and doing what was needed, desiring neither 
to conquer the world nor to call himself King. His aim was 
the political, military, moral and intellectual renaissance of 
his degraded nation. Surveying his reforms, he declares each 
stone in the fabric enough to make a man immortal. ' What 
senseless idealisation of Caesar ! ' wrote Strauss. ' An historian 
may blame, but not scold ; praise, but not lose his balance.' 
Freeman lamented that he had no notion of right and wrong. 
Even his admiring friend Gustav Freytag regretted the intensity 
of his dislikes. Froude alone has adopted the portrait of Caesar 
in its entirety. 

1 His work has been recently brought up to date by Grobe. 



458 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. The charge that he took sides left Mommsen unmoved. 

XXIII ' Those who have lived through historical events, as I have,' 
he wrote, ' begin to see that history is neither written nor made 
without love or hate.' He rejected every absolute standard in 
politics; and scoffed at legitimism. ' When a Government 
cannot govern,' he declared, ' it ceases to be legitimate, and he 
who has the power to overthrow it has also the right.' These 
utterances were naturally hailed with delight by Napoleon III, 
who invited the historian to dinner when in Paris and sent him 
his own life of Caesar in return. But he was anxious that the 
world should not confound his defence of Caesar with a defence 
of Caesarism, and in his second edition he explained his stand- 
point. The Republic was rotten. Caesar's work was necessary 
and wholesome, not because it brought or could bring blessing, 
but because it was the lesser evil. Under other circumstances 
it would have been an usurpation. ' By the same natural 
law that the least organism is far more than the most skilful 
machine, so is every imperfect constitution which gives room 
for the free self-determination of a majority of citizens infinitely 
more than the most humane and wonderful absolutism ; for 
one is living, the other is dead.' The Emperors only held the 
State together and enlarged it mechanically, while within it lost 
its sap and died. It was well that he left the book virtually 
in its original form; for only thus could it retain the character 
which won it world-wide fame. It was a work of genius and 
passion, the creation of a young man, and is as fresh and vital 
to-day as when it was written. The greatest testimony to its 
power is that whereas several full-length histories of Greece 
have been written by German scholars since Curtius, no attempt 
has been made to rival or supersede a history of Rome written 
half a century ago. In sheer brilliance and power no historical 
work in the German language; save Treitschke's ' Deutsche 
Geschichte,' approaches it. 

The supreme excellence of the editions of the Samnite and 
Neapolitan inscriptions had impressed every scholar. In 1853 
the Berlin Academy gave Mommsen a salary for six years to 
work at the Corpus, 1 and in 1858 he was called as a member of 
the Academy to Berlin, where he received a Chair. It was 
the end of his wanderings. The immense scope of the work, 
far larger than the twin enterprise of Bockh, demanded a man 
possessing the power of rapid as well as accurate work, and 

1 See Hirschfeld's memorial address, in Abhandlungen der Berliner 
Akademie, 1904 ; Harnack, Geschichte der Akademie der Wissenschaften, 
1 90 1 ; and Waltzing, Le Recueil General des Inscriptions latines, 1892. 



MOMMSEN AND ROMAN STUDIES 459 

capable of inspiring and controlling his colleagues. The first of CHAP, 
the massive folios appeared in 1863, containing the Republican XXIII 
inscriptions, edited by Mommsen himself, and the Consular Fasti, 
edited by Henzen. The duty of each scholar was to see the 
originals where possible, to examine printed volumes, to winnow 
the grain from the chaff of Ligorio and other malefactors, to 
interpret the local and personal references, to establish the date, 
to suggest the reconstruction of mutilated passages. Of the 
twenty volumes which appeared during his lifetime he edited 
nearly half, including Cisalpine Gaul, South Italy, the Danube 
and the East, while every section underwent his revision and 
bears his mark. A school of skilled epigraphists, Hirschfeld, 
Hiibner, Hulsen, Dessau, Domaszewski, Zangemeister, grew 
up under the eye of the master, ready to continue the work as 
Henzen, De Rossi and other veterans dropped out of the ranks. 
In the year before his death he finished revising the inscriptions 
of the East, and in his last weeks he planned a new edition of 
the first volume. He had estimated the inscriptions at 80,000 ; 
but that number has already been doubled, and new material 
is continually accumulating. New editions and supplements 
keep the work up to date, and the Ephemeris Epigraphica, 
established in 1872, facilitates the communication of discoveries 
and the discussion of plans. No work has ever approached the 
Corpus in fruitfulness for Roman studies. Every department 
of private and public life was irradiated — the administration, 
the towns, the army, taxation, religion, art, social conditions, 
communications. Professor Haverfield has well compared it 
to a cardinal discovery in science, and Camille Jullian has 
pronounced it the greatest service ever rendered by any scholar 
to the knowledge of the past. 

While thus engaged on a task that would have consumed the 
entire energy of ordinary men, Mommsen produced a series of 
treatises each of which marked an epoch in its department. 
The first was the ' Chronology ' of the Republic, in which he 
grappled with a thorny problem scarcely touched since Ideler 
had laid an astronomical foundation in 1826. The work, which 
was in the nature of pioneering, is the least enduring of his 
productions ; but the controversies which it provoked were 
fruitful, and it was on the results of the discussions of a quarter 
of a century that Soltau built the edifice that largely superseded 
that of his master. The ' History of the Coinage,' published in 
1S60, was a far more important achievement. Mommsen had 
begun his numismatic studies during the Italian tour, and now 
es sayed an encyclopaedic survey of a vast and largely untravelled 



460 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, country. He bore eloquent testimony to his great predecessors, 
XXIII Eckhel - 1 and Borghesi, but pointed out the imperfect classifica- 
tion and incompleteness of their work. Moreover, while they 
wrote solely as numismatists, Mommsen never forgot that he 
was an historian. Beginning with the Greco-Asiatic coinage 
from which the Roman grew, he traces the development from 
Rome to Italy, from Italy to the world, discussing the circulation 
and duration of types, the rights of minting, and problems of 
trade and finance. He reviewed the new material for the 
French translation issued by De Blacas ; but he never found 
time to issue a revised edition, and the work is now out of date. 
None the less, he followed the progress of numismatics with 
unflagging interest. He was instrumental in founding the 
Zeitschrift fur Numismatik, and he supported the Corpus 
Nummorum, presenting to it the money given to him on his 
doctor's jubilee. 

By far the most important of the books written during his 
occupation with the Corpus was the treatise on ' Roman Public 
Law.' 2 Double the length of the ' Roman History ' and written 
with more care and reserve, the ' Staatsrecht ' was justly regarded 
by the author as the greatest of his achievements. A work so 
vast and detailed could never win popularity ; but its con- 
summate scholarship renders it the admiration and despair of 
historians. It is the greatest historical treatise on political 
institutions ever written. It lit up the whole range of Roman 
history by exploring the forms in which the people embodied 
their ideas of government. ' As long as jurisprudence ignored 
the State and the people,' he declared, ' and history and philology 
ignored law, both knocked vainly at the door of the Roman 
world.' It is one of the secrets of his greatness that he was a 
lawyer no less than an historian, equally at home in the realm of 
juristic conceptions and political phenomena. He had already 
published the first critical edition of the ' Digest,' thenceforward 
the companion of every jurist. 

The ' Staatsrecht ' was part of a ' Handbook of Roman Anti- 
quities ' by Mommsen and Marquardt, the former undertaking the 
sphere of the State. The work fills over three thousand pages, 
and surveys the whole course and system of Roman government 
and administration. Every statement is buttressed by argu- 
ments and authorities, and scarcely less than one-third of the 
entire space is occupied by notes. It is a series of monographs, not 

1 See Kenner, Joseph von Eckhel, 1871. 

2 See Bernays, ' Die Behandlung des Romischen Staatsrechts,' Ges. 
Abhandlungen, vol. ii., 1885. 



MOMMSEN AND ROMAN STUDIES 461 

a constitutional history. The institutions are studied separately, CHAP. 
yet as limbs of an organic system of public law. The most XXIII 
original part of the work is the treatment of the Principate. 
Historians had seen in the regime of Augustus a violent rupture 
with the old order and the creation of a system that lasted 
virtually unchanged for three centuries. Mommsen pointed 
out that he wished to found a dyarchy, and deliberately gave 
the Senate a large share of power. The office of Princeps was 
not hereditary. The ruler was only the first citizen, raised 
above other officers of state by enjoying his power for life and 
having no colleague. To the command of army and navy and 
the control of selected provinces were gradually added new 
powers till a real Empire was reached. He showed that the 
system was neither empire nor monarchy ; that it was a new 
magistracy set in an old framework ; that it rested on a balance 
of power between the Princeps and the Senate ; that it was a 
compromise between the old oligarchy and the absolutism of 
Caesar ; and that it was not till Diocletian that unqualified auto- 
cracy made its appearance. Thus Rome underwent a gradual 
evolution from the Principate to the Empire. The same story 
is told from the other side in the volume on the Senate. 
Mommsen's theory of the dyarchy has not escaped criticism. 
Gardthausen has maintained that he over-estimated the power of 
the Senate and under-estimated the tendency of the Principate 
to develop into a world-monarchy. The belief of Romans 
that they were living under personal rule was stronger evidence 
than certain republican survivals. A pendant appeared ten years 
later in the massive volume of a thousand pages on ' Criminal 
Law.' 1 No part of the vast territory of Roman law was so 
closely contiguous to history. The work surveys the officials, 
the procedure, the classes of crime and the punishments from the 
beginning of Roman history till Justinian, and in the course of 
his long journey the historian throws light on many aspects of 
Roman civilisation — on morals, marriage and religion. 

When Mommsen terminated his history with the death of 
Caesar it was his intention to continue it after a foundation had 
been laid by a collection of the whole mass of extant inscriptions. 
As the decades passed the world ceased to hope for the work 
which he alone was able to write. It was, however, long before 
the historian himself finally surrendered the idea. A fragment 
written in 1877 was published after his death, and in 1885 there 
appeared what was described as the fifth volume of the ' Roman 

1 See the masterly analysis by Strachan-Davison, Eng. Hist. Review-, 
April 1901. 



462 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. History.' Even more than the ' Staatsrecht,' the ' History of the 
XXIII Roman Provinces from Augustus to Diocletian ' was based on 
the Corpus. 1 A vanished world was reconstructed by the genius 
of a single man, and it became possible to estimate the real 
character and influence of the Empire. Earlier writers had 
perforce regarded it through the eyes of the Roman historians 
and satirists, who placed the personality of the ruler in the fore- 
front of the picture. It was Mommsen's achievement to establish 
that Rome was not the Empire, and that the cruelties and 
eccentricities of the monarch had but little effect throughout 
the boundless expanse of the Roman world. 

The unmistakable result of his researches was to prove that 
the lurid horrors of the capital were in no way typical. The 
authority of Tacitus before Mommsen was that of Livy before 
Niebuhr. The legend, consecrated by Gibbon, of the contrast 
between the first and second centuries, the age of Tiberius and the 
age of the Antonines, was swept away. The provinces, declares 
the historian, enjoyed a tolerable evening after a sultry day ; 
for the greatest achievement of the Empire was to provide three 
centuries of peace. For the tradition of an age of despotism and 
decay he substituted the picture of a stable order from which 
Western civilisation was to arise. In the next place he revealed 
the exact nature of the administrative machine. We learn of the 
Forward policy and the Buffer policy, the border-lands and 
vassal states, the military system, the garrisons, the towns, taxa- 
tion and trade. It is, indeed, a gazetteer of the Empire with 
Italy left out. The British chapter, for which the inscriptions 
were scanty, is thin and unsatisfying. Scarcely more adequate 
is the treatment of Spain. But these constitute only a minute 
fraction of the work, in which every chapter represents a sub- 
stantial addition to knowledge and most are finished master- 
pieces. He was at his best in the countries whose inscriptions 
he had himself edited, such as the Danubian lands and Asia 
Minor. The section on Greece is notable for its discussion of the 
causes of decay, though Noldeke declared the picture of Hellen- 
istic culture too dark. The treatment of the Jews received 
universal praise. The infectious buoyancy of the ' Roman History * 
is gone. The author rarely allows himself to be picturesque, 
and the human element is absent. It is a disinterested study of 
a system of government, not a record of passion and struggle. 
It would have gained by a general view of provincial policy and 
administration, a discussion of the relations of the central to the 

1 See the admirable reviews by W. T. Arnold, Eng. Hist. Review, April 
1886, and Pohlmann, Aus Altertum u. Gegenwart, 1895. 



MOMMSEN AND ROMAN STUDIES 463 

local government, and a review of social and economic forces ; CHAP, 
but his main ideas may be gleaned without difficulty. The XXIII 
incomparable value of the ' Staatsrecht ' and the ' Roman 
Province ' increases the regret that the great historian never set 
the crown on his labours. We should have had a wonderful 
portrait gallery of the Emperors, a masterly exposition of the 
place of Roman law in the Imperial system, a brilliant picture 
of the growth and persecutions of Christianity. He was so 
thoroughly equipped and worked with such lightning rapidity 
that a sketch on the same scale as the ' Roman History ' would 
not have made an impossible draft on his time. 

The later years of the historian's life were largely devoted to 
the study of texts. The most celebrated of his editions was that 
of the testament of Augustus. The original at Rome was lost, 
but an almost perfect copy had been discovered at Ancyra, in 
Asia Minor, by Busbecq in the sixteenth century. It was not till 
the French expedition of Perrot in 1861 that a critical edition 
became possible. It was from this version that Mommsen printed 
the inscription in the Corpus, reissued as a separate volume in 
1865. But part of the Greek translation was still lacking. In 
1882 Humann was chosen to uncover the hidden parts and take a 
plaster cast of the whole. On the strength of the new material 
Mommsen issued a new edition with a revised commentary. A 
brisk controversy arose as to the origin of the most famous of all 
inscriptions. The editor himself contended that it was set up in 
the lifetime of Augustus, while others maintained that it was 
drawn up by him and engraved by his successor with the necessary 
additions. The priceless inscription of the Ara Pacis, discovered 
in Rome in 1890, presented no such difficulties. In the latter 
part of his life he joined the executive of the Monumenia, 
becoming responsible for the Auctores Antiquissimi which 
covered the centuries of the V olkerwanderung. The history of the 
Goths was illustrated by editions of Jordanes and Cassiodorus, 
while the Liber Pontificalis, Nennius and other minor chronicles 
of the fourth to the seventh centuries threw light on an obscure 
period. ' The dark transition between antiquity and modern 
history,' he wrote, ' must be illustrated from both sides, and 
science stands before it as engineers before a mountain tunnel.' 
His last task was an edition of the Theodosian Code, with 
elaborate Prolegomena. Thus the sphere of his studies was 
extended till Rome was swallowed up in the Middle Ages. 

Mommsen naturally took a prominent part in organising or 
encouraging enterprises directed to the elucidation of Roman 
history. Among them was the project of exploring the Limes or 



464 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. Roman wall from the Rhine to the Danube. An organisation was 
XXIII founded in 1890, a journal was instituted to record the progress 
of the work, and a museum established to exhibit the objects 
discovered. The exploration threw light not only on the frontier 
but on methods of fortification and defence. A second work in 
which he took a lively interest was the ' Prosopographia ' or 
biographical dictionary, based almost wholly on the Corpus, 
compiled by his friend and colleague Dessau under the auspices 
of the Berlin Academy. He hailed with delight the work of 
pioneers. Though he was an old man when the importance of 
papyri began to be realised, his pupil Wilcken, the high priest of 
the cult, testifies that he was among the first to seize the signifi- 
cance of these brown rags. The new science touched his own 
work above all in connection with the Roman province of Egypt. 
He helped to found a special journal, while the scheme of a Corpus 
Papyrorum flitted before his mind. He desired that the scholars 
of every country should combine in enterprises too vast for the 
resources of a single state. One of these was a ' Thesaurus 
Linguse Latinse,' a history of every Latin word till the sixth 
century. In 1892 he endeavoured to unite the Academies of 
Germany and Austria for such undertakings, and sketched the 
statutes for a federation. But the Berlin Academy, while 
approving co-operation in the Thesaurus, rejected the plan for 
a closer union. The decision was a disappointment ; but his 
efforts prepared the way for the International Association of 
Academies, which held its first meeting in Paris in 1901. The 
range of vision of the aged historian grew wider and wider. 
His eyes were not dim, nor his natural force abated. He eagerly 
followed the sensational discoveries which revealed the ancient 
civilisations of the East and placed Greece and Rome in a new 
perspective. His thoughts were much occupied with the bearing 
of the new knowledge on the old, and among his last activities 
was the framing of a set of questions relating to the oldest 
criminal law of civilised communities, which he sent to special- 
ists in Greek, Teutonic, Indian, Moslem and Jewish law with a 
view to co-ordinating the broad results of their researches. 
The questions relating to Rome he answered himself. 

One of the elements of his greatness as an historian was his 
vivid interest in every aspect of life. 1 The prince of scholars was 
at the same time an active politician and a leader of thought. 
His brilliant eyes and mobile face expressed every emotion of a 
temperament vibrating with passion and enthusiasm. He had 

1 For an intimate appreciation see Harnack, Aus Wissenschaft u. Leben' 
vol. ii., 1911. 



MOMMSEN AND ROMAN STUDIES 465 

fought with his pen in 1848, and had sacrificed his position at CHAP. 
Kiel and Leipsic to his convictions. In 1861 he entered the XXIII 
Prussian Parliament as a member of the Fortschrittspartei. In 
1881 he became a member of the Reichstag, joining the Radical 
party, led by his friend Bamberger, which seceded from the 
National Liberals when Bismarck introduced Protection. He was 
one of those who felt acutely that the unification of Germany 
imposed the duty of a higher culture, and in his Rectorial Address 
of 1874 he declared that Germans could not rest on their laurels. 
But, like Ranke, he was dismayed at what he described as the 
dehumanising tendencies of the time. He strenuously resisted 
the virulent outbreak of anti-Semitism led by Stocker and 
Treitschke. He denounced the Agrarians as corn speculators 
and brandy-burners. When he defined Protection as a policy of 
swindling, Bismarck prosecuted him, but he was acquitted. He 
opposed the colonial movement as jingoism and the Zedlitz school 
bill as obscurantism. A child of the Aujklarung, he resisted every 
infringement of liberty in science, literature and art. His last 
political pronouncement was a resounding attack on the Agrarian 
tariff of 1902. He died in his sleep in 1903 at the age of eighty- 
six, learning and teaching to the end. 

Mommsen and Ranke stand together and alone in the first 
class of nineteenth-century historians. Ranke' s works were 
almost entirely of a narrative character, while Mommsen earned 
fame not only as a master of narration but as an interpreter 
of institutions and an editor of inscriptions and texts. They 
resembled each other in their marvellous productiveness and 
their combination of critical technique with synthetic vision. 
Both were the honoured masters of generations of eager students, 
and both lived to see their fame established beyond all cavil or 
rivalry. Mommsen's publications extended over sixty years. 
There is no immaturity in his early works and no decline in the 
later. He alone has achieved the complete assimilation and 
reproduction of a classic civilisation for which scholars have 
struggled ever since Scaliger. Rome before Mommsen was 
like modern Europe before Ranke. Latericiam accepit, mar- 
moream reliquit. 

II 

Mommsen's successors l have shown a notable disinclination 
to attempt general surveys ; but among his contemporaries 

1 For a general survey see Kroll, Die Altertumswissenschajt im letzen 
Vierteljahrhundert, 1905. The Year's Work in Classical Studies began to 
appear in 1906. 

2 H 



466 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. Carl Peter and Ihne wrote histories which enjoyed considerable 
XXIII popularity. The first edition of Peter's narrative appeared in 
1853, the second after the ' Roman History ' had taken the 
world by storm. As a Niebuhrian he was among the critics of 
the great historian, but he repudiated the charge that he was 
more conservative. He briefly sketched the legends of the Kings, 
warning his readers that they are unhistorical ; but he accepts 
tradition as a guide to the form and growth of the constitution. 
His narrative only grows detailed when Polybius comes to the 
rescue. He admires the patriotic, moral, orderly life of the 
Republic, but agrees that decay set in after the Gracchi. His 
estimate of the protagonists in the final struggles is sane and 
moderate. ' We cannot blame Cicero,' he remarks, ' for not 
seeing, as we see, that the Republic was doomed.' He admits 
that Caesar governed wisely and well, but he denies his power to 
rejuvenate the State. ' We cannot look at the picture of the 
Roman State at its highest point — that is, during the Punic 
wars — without admiration.' But their conquests led to their own 
destruction, and the century of civil war destroyed the respect for 
law. The ruins of the old Roman character were further broken 
up by Augustus and Tiberius, and trampled under foot by 
Caligula, Claudius and Nero. 

A more popular narrative was that of Ihne, who confined 
himself to the Republic and treated it with much greater fullness. 
Appearing at intervals between 1868 and 1890, the work was 
written in some respects as a counterblast to Mommsen, for whom 
he entertained no friendly feelings. His ambition was to tread 
in the footsteps of Arnold. ' If Arnold had finished his work,' 
he wrote, ' and it had been kept up to date, I should probably 
not have written my book.' His wish was to summarise existing 
knowledge rather than to advance solutions. His account of 
early Rome bears unmistakable traces of Niebuhr and Schwegler. 
He has no heroes, and he deplores the cruelty of the Roman 
character. ' I am accused of unfairness to Rome,' he declared. 
' That is not the case ; but I am fair to Greece and Carthage, 
remembering that the Roman historians, who are not always very 
veracious, have had the ear of the world and have silenced all 
opposing voices.' In reaching the closing days of the Republic 
he accepts the foundation of personal rule as inevitable. Caesar 
and Pompey strove and struggled, but did not really deflect the 
course of history. ' The Republic fell not by Caesar's decision or 
ambition. If he had died early the Republic would none the less 
have found a master. He solved the problem without passion, 
with grandeur and elevation of spirit.' Though the book lacked 



MOMMSEN AND ROMAN STUDIES 467 

power and originality and did little to further Roman studies, its CHAP, 
balanced tone made it a favourite with those who were repelled XXIII 
by the strident partisanship of Mommsen. 

Outside Germany the most ambitious history was written 
by Duruy.. 1 the enlightened Minister of Napoleon III. The first 
two volumes were published in 1843-4 ; but though the third 
and fourth were ready by 1850 they were held back till 1872, 
as they eulogised Caesar and the Empire. He stands on the 
ground of Niebuhr and Schwegler in the early centuries, and 
anticipates Mommsen in his view of the transition to the Empire. 
Writing in 1880 he remarked that the Republicans were but a 
narrow oligarchy who, when they had conquered the world, did 
not know how to govern it. On its fall a hundred families suffered 
loss, but eighty millions profited. It is naturally in the volumes 
written in later life that the chief merit of the work lies. Duruy 
made full use of the Inscriptions, and shared Mommsen 's view 
of the services of the Empire to civilisation. In an elaborate 
survey of society in the first two centuries he contends that the 
life of the provinces was as wholesome as that of the capital was 
corrupt. He continued his work to the death of Theodosius, thus 
achieving the only detailed narrative of Roman history from 
beginning to end. The popularity of the book was enhanced by 
the vast number of the illustrations which the author added to a 
later edition, and it was translated into German, Italian and 
English. Though it was impossible for Duruy, who was also the 
author of histories of France and Greece, to be a profound student, 
his powerful mind and immense energy made him a serviceable 
guide. The most important recent attempt at a detailed narra- 
tive is that of Gaetano de Sanctis, a distinguished member of 
Beloch's flourishing school at Rome. His History, which began 
to appear in 1907 and has reached the Punic wars, was the first 
to gather up the results of research since Mommsen. He steers 
a middle course between scepticism and credulity, dealing fully 
with the early races and with the Greeks in Italy. Reviving a 
favourite idea of Niebuhr, he believes that a large quantity of 
popular poetry once existed and that the legends were derived 
from it, and even that some of the old ballads could be tentatively 
reconstructed from tradition. A still more recent survey of 
the Republic has been supplied by Heitland, who aims at a 
judicial narrative, discarding the paradoxes of fellow -students 
and advancing none of his own. He shows his independence 
of Mommsen in his portraits of Caius Gracchus and Sulla, Cicero 
and Caesar. His recognition of the necessity of Caesar's work 

1 See Lavisse, Victor Duruy, 1895. 

2 h 2 



468 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, does not involve approval of his character or condemnation of 

XXIII the champions of a hopeless cause. 

The most valuable contributions to Roman history have been 
made by men who have chosen special problems or periods as the 
field of their labours. A knowledge of pre-Roman Italy is being 
slowly built up by the combined labours of archaeology, ethnology 
and philology. The influence of physical conditions was for the 
first time thoroughly explored by Nissen. 1 As historians of 
Greece before Curtius had known nothing of the physical cha- 
racteristics of the peninsula, so Niebuhr, Schwegler and even 
Mommsen had paid little attention to the stage on which their 
drama was enacted. Nissen's study of the mountains, the rivers, 
the coasts, the natural resources and the climate supplied a 
new background for historic events. The works of Pais on 
Sicily and Early Italy to the Punic Wars represent the most 
serious attempt to recover the beginnings of civilisation. But 
he is a thorough-going sceptic in regard to the traditions of early 
Rome, and maintains that the Consular Fasti were falsified. 
He has more confidence in the evidence of archaeology, language 
and place names. The ' Ancient Legends of Roman History ' 
form a pendant to his larger work, and discuss recent discoveries in 
the Forum. He believes that many Roman traditions were merely 
mythical personifications of the seven hills of Rome. His positive 
results are somewhat meagre, but every future historian will have 
to weigh his conclusions before rejecting them. The problem of 
the Etruscans has likewise made little progress towards solution. 
Since Otfried Miiller wrote his brilliant survey excavations have 
steadily continued, and their religion, art and social conditions 
are now known in considerable detail. The secrets of the tombs 
were described in Dennis' ' Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria/ 
while art was investigated by Gerhard and every aspect of civilisa- 
tion was studied by Deecke. Yet their origin and racial affinities 
are still in doubt, and their language still defies interpretation. 
Some of the outworks have been carried by Corssen, but the 
citadel remains standing. If the missing key is ever found, it will 
unlock large tracts of early Italian history. 

It was a common complaint against Mommsen that he did not 
discuss the value of his sources, the critical analysis of which was 
inaugurated by Nissen, whose studies of the fourth and fifth 
decades of Livy examined the writings and personality of the 
historian with a thoroughness never before approached. His 
results, which were less negative than those commonly accepted, 
were sharply attacked by Peter, who maintained that Livy's 
1 Italische Landeskunde, z vols., 1 883-1 902. 



MOMMSEN AND ROMAN STUDIES 469 

work was intended rather as an exhortation to patriotism and CHAP. 
virtue than as a serious narrative. His conclusions, however, XXIII 
were supported by Nitzsch, whose ' Romische Annalistik ' marks 
an epoch in Roman studies. He sketches the lost historical litera- 
ture, and declares that we can reach contemporary evidence 
through works of second and third hand. He has been called 
the last of the Niebuhrians, and he certainly belongs rather to 
the school of Niebuhr than of Mommsen. Nitzsch also worked at 
a history of the Republic, fragments of which, supplemented by 
his lectures, appeared after his death. The power and freshness 
of the treatment evoked lively regrets that he had not written 
a complete survey. While Mommsen's main interest was in the 
life of the State, Nitzsch devoted his attention rather to social 
and economic factors, emphasising the struggle of the peasantry 
with the new capitalism of commerce and transport. His mono- 
graph on the Gracchi had focussed attention on the economic 
problems which led to the decline and fall of the Republic before 
Mommsen began to write. 

The closing scenes of the Republic have continued to attract 
historians more than all the earlier centuries. A detailed 
narrative was written by George Long, which, though lacking 
charm and originality, rested on profound acquaintance with 
the literary sources and displayed a cool and balanced judgment. 
Forty years later Greenidge planned a work embracing the last 
century of the Republic and the early Empire to a.d. 70. The 
book opens with a valuable review of social and economic 
conditions, and is mainly devoted to the Gracchi. While Tiberius 
was contented with social reform, Caius demanded also political 
and judicial changes. Both legislated without the Senate, which 
was already an obstruction, and the first bloodshed was the 
beginning of the civil wars. The death of Greenidge after the 
completion of the first volume was a serious blow to Roman 
studies. Other English scholars have made valuable contri- 
butions to a knowledge of the period of transition. Warde 
Fowler has written a popular life of Cassar, which virtually 
adopts Mommsen's view of the hero. Caesar, he declares, 
possessed high aims and true humanity. Rome needed and 
wished for absolutism. The city-state was played out, the 
Senate selfish and incapable. Though technically guilty of 
treason, he was justified by the need of introducing a rational 
government. No statesman has accomplished work of such 
lasting value. Though far from perfect and guilty of occasional 
cruelties, he was affectionate and lovable. He and Cicero, he 
declares, were the noblest characters of the age. The vindication 



470 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, of Cicero has been carried further by Strachan-Davidson's 
XXIII biography and Tyrrell's edition of the Letters. Caesar's cam- 
paigns in Gaul and Britain have been studied with incomparable 
thoroughness by Rice Holmes. In his admirable handbook 
of Roman history and in the Oxford lectures which his hearers 
will never forget, Pelham devoted special attention to the relation 
between the Republic and the Principate. 

No work since Mommsen has aroused such world-wide interest 
as Ferrero's 'Greatness and Decline of Rome.' l Though coldly 
received by scholars, its ability is unquestionable. Beginning life 
as a pupil of Lombroso he became an active socialist politician, 
and it was from the point of view of a sociologist that he 
approached the study of the ancient world. He traces the fall 
of the Republic to the advent of the mercantile era in an old 
agricultural and aristocratic society. The fall of Carthage was 
followed by an influx of riches which led to an increase of luxury 
and a higher standard of needs. The conflict of rich and poor 
became acute. Foreign policy and internal evolution were deter- 
mined by changes in the distribution of wealth, and individual 
actors in the drama are borne helplessly along on the eddying 
current of economic change. Thus the critical period of Roman 
history is primarily an economic problem, a struggle rather of eco- 
nomic forces than of political parties or leaders. The Republic 
was slain not by Sulla or Caesar but by Imperialism. ' Great 
men are unaware of the historic work of which they are the 
instruments and victims ; for they, like their fellows, are the 
sport of what we may call the destiny of history.' For the old 
vision of soldiers struggling with one another for power was 
substituted that of the conflict of men with a fate that was too 
strong for them. Ferrero is still more audacious than Mommsen 
in his efforts to visualise the past. He compares the Romans 
of the early Republic to the Boers, Lucullus to Napoleon, Caesar 
to a Tammany boss, the power of Augustus to the President of 
the United States. But these and other comparisons, though 
irritating to the scholar from their want of accuracy, attracted 
readers who shrink from less sensational works. 

The narrative becomes detailed when Sulla dies. One of the 
novelties of the book is the extraordinary importance attached 
to Lucullus, ' the strongest man in the history of Rome,' who 
turned Italy from civil war to the conquest of the East But 
it was only a temporary diversion, and quarrels quickly arose 

1 Among the best of many criticisms are those by Besnier, Revue 
Historique, vol. xcv., and Haverfield, ' Roman History since Mommsen, 
Quarterly Review, Oct. 1912. 



MOM MS EN AND ROMAN STUDIES 471 

about the spoils. He blames Mommsen's fanatical admiration CHAP, 
for Caesar, and contends that his policy was that of an accom- XXIII 
plished opportunist. He was ' the unconscious instrument of 
Destiny for an immense work ' ; but he never saw the goal or 
fathomed the meaning of his own enterprises. He fought in 
Gaul because there was nowhere else to fight, ignorant of the 
fact that its conquest would be the beginning of European 
history. He was above all a destroyer, and he founded nothing 
durable. As Caesar dominates the first half of the book, his 
nephew pervades the second. While most critics deem Mommsen 
to have underestimated the power of the Princeps, Ferrero 
believes he exaggerated it. Augustus emerges from his pages a 
man of small calibre and limited vision, cowardly and nervous 
at first, though growing in mind and will in later years. He was 
not the successor but the antithesis of Caesar. The regime of 
Augustus was not a monarchy, not even a dyarchy. His desire 
was to replace the State under the control of the Senate and to 
give the Senate the assistance of a Moderator. Thus he was 
but the President of a constitutional republic, and Ferrero calls 
his volume ' The Republic of Augustus.' Augustus presided 
over the transition wisely. The Empire was neither phenomenally 
wicked nor particularly happy. The historian is at his best in 
illustrating the connection between economic phenomena and 
political evolution. His studies of character and his estimate 
of statesmanship are weak. His mechanical philosophy reduces 
history to little more than a struggle of blind forces. Yet he 
denies that he is a materialist. He declares that the political, 
economic and social crises of Rome depended on the change of 
customs caused by the augmentation of wealth, expenditure and 
needs, which was in essence a psychological change. 1 ' The 
fundamental force in history is psychological, not economic' 
It is the language as well as the spirit of Lamprecht. The key to 
Roman history is ' the automatic increase of ambitions and 
desires.' The mixture of East and West was at once the glory and 
weakness of Rome. The corruption of Rome has been greatly 
exaggerated. There was in reality only the increase in wealth 
and wants which we are witnessing to-day. The appetite for 
pleasure and luxury grew, changing mentality and morality, 
policy and institutions. The rich parvenus succeeded the 
aristocracy, and the rich, then as now, were restless, neurotic 
and pessimistic. Such changes are at once the condition and 
penalty of progress. 

1 See Characters and Events of Roman History from Ccesar to Nero, 
Lowell Lectures for 1908. 



472 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. No adequate history of the Empire has yet been written. A 

XXI11 provisional attempt was made by Hermann Schiller, a pupil of 
Mommsen ; but his conscientious volumes lack vitality and dis- 
tinction. Professor Bury has compiled a brief but useful sum- 
mary of the first two centuries of the Empire. Domaszewski's 
sketches of the Emperors are unworthy of his high reputation. 
Among monographs on the Caesars Gardthausen's monumental 
survey of the life and work of Augustus holds the first place. 
The rehabilitation of Tiberius has been pursued with some 
success, and Willrich has rendered Caligula intelligible. Hen- 
derson's striking monograph on Nero typifies the reaction 
against traditional conceptions of the Empire, and an attempt 
has been made to rescue the memory of Elagabulus. Gregorovius 
has devoted a pleasant volume to Hadrian. The detailed study 
of the Provinces in the light of inscriptions, coins and archaeology 
has made considerable advance. Otto Hirschf eld's analysis 
of the Imperial administration has added new details to his 
master's picture. Fustel de Coulanges, in ' La Gaule Romaine,' 
described by Camille Jullian as the best book on Roman history 
since Montesquieu, presents a masterly study of the institutions 
of the Empire. Camille Jullian himself, after winning fame by 
his spirited study of Vercingetorix, is at work on an encyclo- 
paedic survey of Roman Gaul. Professor Haverfield has dedicated 
his life to Roman Britain. The Austrian jurist Mitteis has 
devoted a monograph of monumental learning, based on papyri 
and inscriptions, to the transition from Hellenic to Roman law 
in the Eastern Provinces. Renier collected the inscriptions in 
Algeria, and taught exact methods from his chair at the College 
de France. In the skilful hands of Cichorius the reliefs on 
Trajan's Column at Rome have yielded a rich harvest for the 
geography and military administration of the Empire. 

Though the constitutional history of Rome owes most to 
Mommsen, valuable contributions have been made by scholars 
working on independent lines. The first thorough exploration 
of the institutions of the Republic was undertaken in Ludwig 
Lange's ' Roman Antiquities.' i His caution is in striking contrast 
to the dash and certitude of Mommsen. In a review of the 
' Staatsrecht,' which attempted to present Roman government 
as an organism, Lange defended his antiquarian method on the 
ground that by following Mommsen's lead concrete facts might 
be sacrificed to j uristic symmetry. Both methods were necessary, 
and Mommsen's was impossible but for the foundation laid by 
workers of another school. The ' Staatsrecht ' found another 
1 See Neumann, Ludwig Lange, 1886. 



MOM M SEN AND ROMAN STUDIES 473 

and more hostile critic in Madvig. 1 The great Danish scholar CHAP, 
had studied law in his youth, but quickly deserted it for Latin XXIII 
texts. In his old age, when blindness put a stop to his favourite 
studies, he dictated his volumes on the Constitution. To begin 
with the Magistracy, he declared, passing over the Senate and 
people, was to build the roof before the foundation. Mommsen 
explained political forms by modern theories, and some of his 
hypotheses were strained and fanciful. Madvig totally rejected 
the attempt to recover the conceptions which alone could afford 
deep insight into the institutions and their connection with 
one another. He treats the Empire in the old way as lacking 
all constitutional character. He makes no pretence to supply 
new material, and is descriptive, not interpretative. Neglecting 
the inscriptions, it was dismissed by Otto Hirschfeld as out of 
date before its publication. A middle course is steered between 
the descriptive and juristic schools by Herzog's ' History and 
System of the Roman Constitution,' which emphasised the 
necessity of seizing the spirit of Roman public law, while con- 
testing the success of Mommsen's endeavour. Unlike Mommsen, 
Herzog relates the growth of the constitution as a whole in its 
historical development. Of greater importance than any of 
these works was Willems' study of the Senate. Original without 
rashness, equally at home in history and law, the monumental 
work of the Belgian scholar is one of the most valuable contri- 
butions to Roman history ever made. 

Life and culture have been diligently explored ; but the ex- 
treme paucity of materials makes the recovery of the civilisation 
of the early Republic almost impossible. The most daring 
attempt was made by Fustel de Coulanges, who offered a complete 
interpretation of Roman civilisation in the terms of religion. 
The cult of the family, he declared in ' La Cite Antique,' was the 
keystone of the fabric. Early Roman society, which was founded 
on a religious basis, was simple and pure. With the break 
up of the family came the decline of the Republic. Though 
Fustel over-simplified a complex problem and attempted to 
unlock the life of centuries by a single master-key, he presented 
an extraordinarily suggestive reconstruction of society. Less 
harmonious but more convincing pictures of religious life and 
thought have been painted by Wissowa and Warde Fowler. 
Many aspects of society have been illuminated by the massive 
scholarship of Marquardt. The civilisation of the Empire has been 
the theme of three works of outstanding importance. Fried- 
lander's ' Sittengeschichte,' published in i860, immediatelybecame 
1 See Nettleship, Lectures and Essays, Second Series, 1895. 



474 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, a European classic. Revised by a group of specialists after 
XXIII the author's death, it still offers the most complete picture of 
Roman civilisation from Augustus to the end of the Antonines. 
Next in time come the fascinating studies of Gaston Boissier, 
whose • Roman Religion ' discussed the entry of Oriental faiths, the 
rise of the worship of the Emperor and the philosophy of Seneca. 
His later work, ' The End of Paganism,' continues the narrative. 
The inner life of the Empire has been more recently interpreted by 
Dill, whose weighty volumes on Roman Society in the second and 
fourth centuries are distinguished for their insight and learning. 
The Empire has naturally profited by the works of Renan and 
Harnack, Neumann and Ramsay, by de Rossi's explorations in the 
catacombs and Cumont's epoch-making studies of Mithraism. 

No province has been more sedulously cultivated than the 
archaeology of Rome. The partial excavation of the Forum by 
Fea during the French occupation gave the needed impetus to 
research ; and during the years of the Restoration Nibby and 
Canina worked at the reconstruction of the city. Systematic 
treatment began with Bunsen's ' Description of the City of 
Rome ' and Becker's masterly sketches in his ' Roman Anti- 
quities.' It was long, however, before scientific methods were 
universally applied. Ampere's vivacious volumes, once a 
favourite with visitors, were thoroughly uncritical. Parker, 
like Dyer, accepted the fables of Livy ; but the value of his 
collection of photographs of classical remains was unaffected. 
The reputation of English scholarship was retrieved by Burn and 
Middleton. It was, however, by German and Italian scholars 
that the history and form of ancient Rome were recovered. 
The ' Roman Topography ' of Jordan, a pupil of Moritz Haupt, 
marked the first decisive advance since Bunsen. During recent 
years Boni's excavations in the Forum and on the Palatine have 
produced sensational results. A journal of the excavations was 
established in 1876, and the results have been popularised by 
Lanciani and Hulsen. The exploration of Ostia has begun. 
The excavation of Pompeii moves slowly forward, and the rich 
harvest of results has been garnered by Mau. The resurrection 
of Herculaneum has been delayed by the expense involved in 
the necessity of removing a village and cutting through the solid 
rock. Excavation has largely increased the known remains of 
classical art, and the traditional conception of Roman sculpture 
as purely derivative has been overthrown. Though immense 
progress has been made, Italy still hides many secrets in her 
bosom ; and the Schools of Archaeology in the Eternal City 
look forward to a future of fruitful rivalry. 



CHAPTER XXIV 

GREECE AND BYZANTIUM 



Owing to the early death of Otfried Miiller the task of gather- CHAP, 
ing up the sheaves fell to two younger men. Duncker's x ' History XXIV 
of Antiquity ' played a useful part in popularising a knowledge 
of the ancient world. The third and fourth volumes were devoted 
to Greece ; but the narrative only reached the Persian wars. 
At the end of his life he returned to the classical world, rewrote 
the work, which had not been revised since i860, and added two 
volumes continuing the story to the death of Pericles. The 
book was written for the cultured public and it fulfilled its aim, 
for it was lucid and well arranged. It was rather his political 
insight than his scholarship that gave the Greek volumes their 
importance. For Duncker the paramount necessity for a State 
is the power to defend itself against attack. His hero is Themis- 
tocles, ' the founder of Attic power, the most far-seeing and power- 
ful of all Greeks.' While recognising the personal eminence of 
Pericles, he denies his military capacity and censures his policy. 
He made Athens free and brilliant, but did not give her the power 
to defend her treasures. 

This political approach was widely different from that of 
Ernst Curtius, 3 who was won for classical studies by the lectures 
and friendship of Otfried Miiller. ' To hear him,' wrote the 
young Gottingen student to his father, 'is an invaluable privi- 
lege ; for he is an incomparable teacher. The clearness of his 
thought, the lively grace of his lectures, the fullness of his 
knowledge fascinate me afresh every day and evoke new en- 
thusiasm for the science which he has revivified.' Accompanying 

1 See Haym, Das Leben Max Duncker s, 1S91. 

2 See Ernst Curtius, Ein Lebensbild in Brief en, 1903 ; H. Gelzer, 
' Wanderungen u. Gesprache mit Ernst Curtius,' in Ausgewahlte Kleine 
Schriften, 1907 ; Freeman, Historical Essays, Second Series, 1873, 



476 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. Brandis and his family to Athens as tutor in 1836 he acted 
XXIV as guide when his beloved master paid his fatal visit in 1840. 
Curtius was with him to the last, and dedicated his life to the 
enterprise which had been the main object of the journey. On 
Miiller's death he returned to Germany, and in 1844 sprung into 
notice by a lecture on the Acropolis delivered before a dis- 
tinguished audience in Berlin. The brilliant young scholar was 
invited to become the tutor of the Crown Prince Frederick, and 
was appointed extraordinary Professor at Berlin. His first impor- 
tant work was an historical geography of the Peloponnesus in the 
spirit of Karl Ritter, resting on an intimate acquaintance with 
the country and a thorough study of the literary and monumental 
sources. In receiving Curtius into the Academy of Berlin in 1853 
the veteran Bockh, the master of his master, gave warm expres- 
sion to his admiration. ' I have spent my life testing and sifting 
details, the necessary foundation of further research. But you 
have seen the land itself, the frame of the picture.' The address 
reads like a Nunc Dimittis, and the younger scholar may well 
have felt it a summons to exhibit Greek civilisation as the unity 
which floated before the master's vision. 

In 1856 Curtius was appointed to the Chair of Otfried Miiller 
at Gottingen, and in the following year began the publication 
of his ' History of Greece.' Written for the same series as Momm- 
sen's ' Rome,' the work was designed as a summary of existing 
knowledge for the cultured public. ' It is a book,' he wrote to his 
pupil the Crown Prince, ' not for scholars but for all who care for 
history, a book to be read, without notes or fragments of Greek 
or Latin.' For such an undertaking he possessed rare qualifica- 
tions. He was an enthusiastic admirer of every aspect of Greek 
civilisation. He combined the idealism of the romantics with the 
exact scholarship of the critical school. Above all he was 
thoroughly acquainted with the land itself and the remains of 
its ancient glories. On the other hand he had shown little interest 
in the political side of Greek history, and held aloof from the con- 
troversies which occupied the thoughts of his brother Professors 
during the middle decades of the century. These qualities were 
to assert themselves in the History, to earn it its fame and to 
impose limits to its authority. He begins with a comprehensive 
survey of the land of Greece ; and his recognition of the part 
played by nature set an example to future historians. ' I have 
read your first volume line by line,' wrote the aged Humboldt. 
' Your survey of the country is a masterpiece of nature painting.' 
He points out that the position of the peninsula on the frontier 
between Europe and Asia facilitated the intercourse which proved 



GREECE AND BYZANTIUM 477 

so fruitful for its development. Like Duncker he rejects Grote's CHAP, 
hostile view of the Tyrants, and equally refuses to share his ad- XXIV 
miration for Cleisthenes. It is in the description of culture and 
civilisation at different epochs that he excels. The chapter on 
' The Unity of Greece ' passes in review the bonds which held 
together the scattered members of the Greek world — the games 
and the oracles, literature and art. The pictures of sacred 
places, such as Delphi and Olympia, reveal the intimate touch 
of personal knowledge. Himself deeply religious, he took Greek 
religion more seriously than most historians. The account of 
the Persian wars is mediocre ; but the great chapter on ' The 
Years of Peace ' is one of the gems of the book. In no other 
history is the glamour of the age of Pericles so vividly realised. 
To Grote Greece meant democracy ; to Curtius she stood for 
culture. Athenian civilisation was an imperishable possession of 
humanity, the radiant spring-time of the spirit. He rejects the 
view that the Macedonians were barbarians, maintaining that 
Philip had learnt to value Hellenic culture ; but he places 
Demosthenes beside Pericles, though his task was beyond 
human power. The uprising under his inspired leadership was 
the last great deed of free Greece ; and the narrative ends with 
Chaeronea. 

The main weakness of the work lies in the treatment of action. 
JBernays remarked laconically that he was more successful with 
res than with res gestae. It was a temperamental disqualification 
for which no perfection of scholarship could atone. His poetical 
nature never cared much for the prose of institutions, war and 
faction. In his pictures of culture he surpasses Thirlwall, Grote 
and Duncker as much as he falls behind them in his handling of 
political problems. Though it was mainly the representation of 
culture that won fame for the book, even this part of the work 
has not escaped criticism. He began his studies in the intoxicat- 
ing atmosphere of the second Renaissance. He himself had been 
among the first to visit the enchanted land, and the brightness of 
the vision never faded. Greece stands out in his pages rather as 
an exquisite jewel than as a link in the chain of history. Wilam- 
owitz has spoken of its soft, elegiac tone, of the gentle mourning 
for lost beauty, of the mood which ruined cities awake. His style 
is fluent and polished, and the entire work suggests grace, not 
strength. Bunsen aptly described it as a civilising book. It 
was of real service in providing Germany with the first detailed 
survey of Greek history based on a complete knowledge of 
recent research ; but it was not a work which, like that of 
Mommsen, warned competitors off the course. 



478 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. The later years of his life were in part devoted to archseolo 

XXIV gical research. His intimate friendship with the Crown Prince 
enabled him to secure substantial help for the complete excava- 
tion of Olympia, which had been demanded by Winckelmann 
and begun by the French expedition of 1829. The work was 
commenced in 1875 and yielded a rich harvest of results, among 
them the Hermes of Praxiteles. His last important composition 
was an historical survey of Athens, surveying the fortunes of the 
city throughout the ages. He was not only a scholar but a mis- 
sionary. His gospel was the glory and beauty of Greece, and his 
popular essays and addresses, collected into volumes, carried the 
message into the widest circles. The immense sale of his History 
was a compensation for the cold looks of the specialists. ' The 
good German savant,' he wrote sarcastically in 1881, ' shrugs his 
shoulders when a book is readable and when there are no beads of 
perspiration on the author's brow.' He was profoundly convinced 
that a knowledge of Greek civilisation was not only an indispens- 
able part of culture but an aid to the development of character. 
Greece alone taught the lesson of harmonious self-realisation 
He never quite forgave Gelzer for plunging into the Byzantine 
Empire. No historian has lived a life of more single-minded 
devotion to his task than this refined and gentle scholar, the High 
Priest of Hellenism in its purest and most spiritual form. 

After Thirlwall and Grote, Duncker and Curtius, it might seem 
as if there was only room for monographs ; but during the last 
quarter of the century the discoveries of Schliemann * revolu- 
tionised the treatment of early Greek history. At seven he 
read of the burning of Troy and longed to visit the site, declaring 
that the fortifications could not have wholly vanished. At ten 
he wrote a Latin essay on the Trojan war. His father's poverty 
compelled him to begin earning his living at fourteen, and it was 
not till the age of thirty-four that he began to learn Greek. At 
forty-one he had become a rich man and retired from business. 
In 1870 he began the excavation of Hissarlik, and in 1874 published 
his ' Trojan Antiquities.' The learned world laughed at his naive 
identifications of the objects and buildings described in the 
Iliad, and he confused the different strata superimposed upon one 
another. None the less his discoveries aroused world-wide 
interest, while his shortcomings were only known to scholars. 
Hindered in his work at Troy by the Turkish Government 
he transferred his attention to Mycenae, where he discovered 
the graves of the kings filled with gold and other ornaments. 
In a telegram to the King of the Hellenes he announced that he 
1 See Schuchhardt, Schliemann' s Excavations, 1891. 



GREECE AND BYZANTIUM 479 

had found Agamemnon and his household ; but more careful CHAP, 
study revealed the fact that the treasure did not belong to a XXTV 
single period and that the number and sex of the persons did not 
agree with the legend. It was, however, of minor importance 
whether the body of Agamemnon or of other kings had been 
found ; for he had revealed a vanished civilisation. He next 
discovered at Orchomenos the so-called Treasury of Minyas, 
and, after a further visit to Troy in company with Dorpfeld, laid 
bare the fortress-city of Tiryns, the neighbour of Mycenae. 

When Schliemann died in 1890 he had filled the world with 
his fame. In twenty years he had unearthed three cities, had 
revealed Mycenaean civilisation, and had given an incalculable 
impetus to archaeological research. Yet he was almost 
pathetically incompetent to interpret the marvellous treasures 
he had brought to light. He was filled with a romantic attach- 
ment to Greece. He married a Greek lady, and called his son 
Agamemnon and his daughter Andromache. But he possessed 
neither the training nor the qualities required for the task of 
scientific excavation. He treated Homer as the historian no 
less than the poet of the Trojan wars. He held the Mycenaeans 
to be Homer's Achaeans, and it was left to others to point out 
that the civilisation of Mycenae was pre-Homeric, and to Dorp- 
feld to prove that the city of Hector and Achilles was the sixth, 
not the second. Schliemann was a pioneer, a conquistador, 1 
and much of his work has had to be done again by Dorpfeld. 
Like Cesnola, who spent years burrowing in the sites of Cyprus, 
his sumptuous volumes are of little value for the purposes of 
exact scholarship. If he revealed the romantic possibilities 
of excavation, his errors emphasised the need of professional 
training. 

II 

The discoveries of Schliemann provided the most precious 
new material for Greek history ; but only second in importance 
was the Aristotelian treatise on the Constitution of Athens, 
published by Kenyon in 1891. The growing mass of inscriptions 
and papyri, the exploration of sites, the recovery of innumerable 
objects of art, and the reconstruction of the civilisations of the 
ancient East encouraged fresh attempts at a history of Greece. 2 

1 Salomon Reinach. 

2 Recent Greek studies are excellently summarised in Bauer, Die 
Forschungen zur Griechischen Geschichte, 1899, and Kroll, Die Altertums- 
wissenschaft im letzten Vierteljahrhundert, 1905. 



480 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. The massive work of Busolt, which began to appear in 1885, 
XXIV stands apart from its rivals, aiming less at a detailed narrative 
than at an exhaustive review of the sources and of modern 
scholarship. The second edition was described by the author 
as a new work ; for the discovery of the Politeia rendered mere 
revision inadequate. His volumes, which have reached the 
Peloponnesian war and are to stretch to the Macedonian conquest, 
present a minute survey of the materials for a knowledge of 
Mycenaean civilisation, and show the world of Homer to be 
later and simpler. The foundation of the historical states, the 
rise and decline of the Athenian Empire are discussed with 
boundless knowledge and cautious scholarship. ' My history,' 
he frankly declares, ' is written rather for learning than for 
reading, and it makes no pretence to compare in attractiveness 
with Curtius or Duncker.' More than half the entire book 
consists of notes. Indeed the text is rather a commentary than 
a narrative. The work is none the less of extraordinary value, 
and has become the indispensable companion of every serious 
worker in the field of Greek studies. 

Very different is the well-known history of Holm, 1 who aimed 
at supptying an intelligible narrative for the use of the cultured 
public rather than for the narrower world of scholars. His wish, 
he declared, was to summarise results and to separate fact from 
hypothesis. ' The Greeks did not always hit on the best or 
nearly the best course of action ; but they were an exceptionally 
high type of humanity, the great seekers after perfection.' 
This sanity distinguishes the book throughout. He holds the 
balance even between Sparta and Athens. He brushes aside 
Curtius' exaggeration of the influence of Delphi, contending that 
the Oracle manifested little originality or foresight, and merely 
sanctioned what had been already decided. Like nearly all 
recent historians he pays homage to the genius of Themistocles, 
and denies that he was a traitor. His keen admiration of 
Pericles as a great statesman, the equal and successor of Solon, 
does not blind him to his lack of military talent. On reaching the 
fourth century he contests the decay of the Athenians ; but he 
pronounces the Macedonians Greeks in the wider sense of the 
word. ' Chaeronea was not less glorious for the conquered than 
for the conquerors.' The success of Demosthenes, he declares, 
would have continued the old exploitation of Greece by Persia 
and the civil wars of the States. Alexander was a genuine Greek, 
in whose achievement the good vastly outweighs the evil. The 
fourth and concluding volume, bringing the story to Augustus, 
1 See Biographtsches Jahrbuch fur die Altertumswissenschaft for 1901, 



GREECE AND BYZANTIUM 481 

first attempted a comprehensive survey of the age of political CHAP. 
decline. Holm's work is a sound and scholarly performance, XXIV 
without any attempt at paradox or propaganda. There is 
nothing arresting in his style and nothing original in his reflec- 
tions. He had no instinct for politics, like Droysen and Duncker, 
and the chapters on literature and culture are somewhat common- 
place. Economic phenomena are very inadequately handled. 
Yet the book possesses merits of its own. It has drawn more 
from coins than any of its rivals. ' There is great charm,' he 
writes, ' in making use of numismatics. There is more history 
in these studies than in many a laborious criticism of authorities.' 
The Sicilian chapters are based on the author's larger work, 
and possess an authority which no other history of Greece 
approaches. The illustrative and critical notes are admirable 
throughout. In its English dress it has taken the place of Grote 
and Curtius as a handbook for learners and teachers, and it 
remains the best connected survey of the whole course of Greek 
history till Greece and Hellenism were swallowed- up in the 
Roman world. 

A few years later Beloch, the distinguished scholar who has 
long held the chair of ancient history at Rome, produced a 
history differing in many respects from that of Holm. Though 
less suitable for beginners, it is far more stimulating for advanced 
students and scholars. The whole book is audacious, uncon- 
ventional, a ringing challenge to tradition. Writing in the 
spirit of the Aufklarung he sees in Greece not the inventor 
of democracy nor the mirror of beauty, but rather the mother 
of science and the champion of reason. ' Our whole modern 
civilisation rests on a Hellenic foundation. Thence come the 
goods which make our life worth living — our science, our art, our 
ideals of intellectual and political freedom.' In words that seem 
like a voice from the grave of Buckle he declares that all progress 
in civilisation is in the last resort progress in knowledge. The 
first volume extends to the Peloponnesian war, and presents a 
far less detailed summary than that of his predecessors. He is 
thoroughly sceptical about early times, and dismisses the Dorian 
invasion as an invention of scholars. But, though much is 
omitted, one important aspect of Greek history receives special 
attention. Beloch had long studied the economic aspects of 
history, and his work on population in Greece and Rome had 
opened up a new and fruitful field. He complains that the 
economic history of Greece has been neglected since Bockh ; and 
his chapters on social changes, trade, industry, the growth of 
towns, population, the rise of prices and other vital questions 



482 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, form the most original part of the book. His highly critical 
XXIV estimate of Athenian democracy had been already announced in 
a striking monograph. He calls Pericles a great Parliamentarian, 
which in his mouth is no eulogy. He failed to maintain the 
Empire at the height to which it had been raised by Themis- 
tocles and Cimon, and his legacy was the Peloponnesian war. 
Like Grote, with whom he differs in almost everything else, he 
has a good word for Cleon. He rejects the idea that the Greeks 
were demoralised by the war with Sparta, for the moral level 
of the fifth century was low. On the contrary they were 
rendered more humane by the growth of the scientific 
movement. Sophocles and Herodotus were still naively 
superstitious, whereas Thucydides and Euripides reveal the 
beginning of scientific thinking. 

As Beloch had no great admiration for the Athenian Empire, 
he sheds no tears over its fall. Particularism prevented the 
Greek communities, separately or in combination, from fulfilling 
the first duty of a State, namely self-defence. Such a condition 
could not continue, and the battle of Chaeronea brought the 
unity which the best Greeks had long vainly tried to attain. 
Local self-government was left, and Philip was an indulgent 
master. He maintains that Greeks and Macedonians felt 
themselves one, and that the opposition to Macedonia was in 
no sense a national movement. They spoke Greek with only a 
dialect difference, and were closely connected by race. The 
Greeks only regarded them as barbarians owing to their lack of 
culture, a fault that was quickly cured. While the historian 
hurries over the familiar story of independent Greece, he allows 
himself ample space for the ever widening empire of Greek 
culture which began with the conquests of Alexander. He has 
no very high opinion of Alexander as a general or statesman. 
His claim to divinity was the first reaction of the East on the 
conquerors, the first step along the road which led the freest of 
peoples to Byzantinism. He died when he was beginning his 
full work ; but the forces he set in motion continued to operate 
and changed the face of the world. A masterly survey of the 
new regions unlocked by his sword fills half a large volume, and 
embraces the growth of trade, coinage, banking, population, 
finance, society, education, religion and science, literature and 
art. ' The world belonged to the Greeks,' he writes, ' but could 
they hold it ? ' The fourth and concluding 1 volume answers 
the question in the negative. The break up of Alexander's 
kingdom ushers in a dreary period, which even Beloch fails to 
make interesting. 



GREECE AND BYZANTIUM 483 

The most authoritative history of Greece ever written is CHAP. 
that of Eduard Meyer. Forming part of the vast survey of XXIV 
antiquity to which he has devoted his life, it differs in character 
from all its rivals. ' For the great tasks of history salvation is 
only to be found when it becomes conscious of its universal 
character, in ancient as well as in modern times.' Only by 
treating Greece in connection with the Mediterranean peoples 
can its real nature be seized and the baseless hypotheses of 
generations of scholars be swept away. This colossal task, 
which was beyond the strength of Duncker, has been performed 
by Meyer, the only man of our time or of any time who could 
have accomplished it. European history, he declares, begins 
on the iEgean ; and his unequalled knowledge of the early 
Mediterranean empires gives special authority to his judgments 
on Mycenaean civilisation. Though it did not exist in western 
Greece, its wares and graves have been found in Italy, Sicily and 
Sardinia. The only great Mycenaean city in Asia Minor was 
Troy. Mycenaean art was strongly oriental ; but the culture as 
a whole was essentially Greek. He accepts the Dorian invasion, 
but adds that it is uncertain whether the Dorians came together 
or by infiltration. In any case their numbers were large 
enough to swamp the population they found. Mycenaean 
culture gradually died out everywhere, for it had outlived itself. 
Dorian civilisation is but little known, and has to be recon- 
structed from Homer and such survivals as Sparta. Art was 
neglected ; but the glory of the period was the epic. ' Homer ' 
was the outcome of centuries of composition, ending in repeated 
editing and unification. The most important achievement of 
the Greek Middle Ages was the colonisation of the Mediterranean 
and the gradual ousting of the Phoenicians, a process in regard 
to which we possess no sources, but of which the sites themselves 
are sufficient testimony. 

Solon is the first Greek statesman whose personality we know, 
and his importance is greater than Cleisthenes. Meyer describes 
the rise of the Persian Empire with a fullness of knowledge which 
no historian of Greece has approached. His picture of fifth- 
century Athens in many ways resembles that of Beloch. Themis- 
tocles, he declares, was the greatest of Athenians. After him 
there were great deeds but no lasting successes. Demos was a 
cruel master, as merciless as the most capricious despot, and was 
responsible for disgraceful condemnations from Miltiades and 
Themistocles downwards. Athens possessed no real government 
and suffered from permanent anarchy. Pericles was less of a 
statesman than Themistocles, because he was more of an idealist. 



484 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. ' The vices of radical democracy were unveiled when the balance 
XXIV caused by his greatness was removed.' The abyss was already 
opening under his feet, and he only postponed the crash. Neither 
he nor any man could provide the stable foreign policy which 
every State needs. The fate of Athens was also the fate of Greece. 
Before Philip drew his sword the strength of the nation was con- 
sumed by conflict. ' When Greek culture had reached its highest 
point and was ripe to become world-culture, the nation had lost 
all political importance. It was broken to pieces, and the ruins 
lay there for anyone to pick up.' The narrative breaks off with 
Epaminondas ; but there is no doubt what the verdict on the 
Macedonian conquest would have been. Meyer is entirely free 
from Beloch's tendency to paradox. His critical notes contain 
a complete account of the sources and of modern scholarship. 
Though politics are in the foreground, he is equally at home in 
literature and art, philosophy and religion. That his work 
rests throughout on independent study was further revealed 
by the ' Forschungen,' the first volume of which discusses the 
problems of early history, the second those of the fifth centur}'. 
The studies of Herodotus and Thucydides are of peculiar interest. 
He declares that the political bias of the former has never been 
fully realised, and maintains that his object was to champion 
Athenian hegemony as the Prussian school championed the hege- 
mony of Prussia. For Thucydides, on the other hand, his admira- 
tion is without limits, and he brushes aside all reflections on his 
impartiality. ' The speeches are the real nerve-centre of the 
work and also the highest point of his and all historical art.' 
While the task of rewriting Greek history in the light of new 
discoveries has been mainly undertaken by German scholars, two 
other attempts deserve notice. When Duruy had finished his 
volumes on Rome, he compiled a history of Greece in which inscrip- 
tions and archaeology were utilised. The work makes no pretence 
to profound or original research ; but it is a scholarly summary 
presented in an attractive form. He is more sparing of political 
judgments than in his volumes on Rome ; but he has a kindlier 
feeling for the Greek democracies than is common in Germany. 
The first important history produced by an English scholar 
since Grote and the only attempt to utilise the vast mass of new 
material is that of Professor Bury. At once scientific and 
popular this relatively brief summary forms an admirable intro- 
duction to the study of Greek history. Making no attempt at 
detailed description of literature and art, philosophy and religion, 
the author confines himself in the main to a political narrative 
to the death of Alexander. 



GREECE AND BYZANTIUM 485 



III 

Greece is no exception to the rule that much of the most 
valuable work is contained in monographs. Among living men 
no one has contributed so much to a knowledge of Greek civilisa- 
tion as Wilamowitz. His studies of Homer and Euripides have 
illuminated the history of literature and religion. His massive 
treatise, ' Aristotle and Athens,' has reconstructed the Athenian 
State in the light of the Politeia. His innumerable dissertations 
and lectures have lit up every aspect of Greek life. With Meyer 
and Wilamowitz to guide him the student will not go far astray. 
The discovery of Mycenaean civilisation has naturally been fol- 
lowed by lively discussion. We know that it was pre-Homeric 
and pre-Dorian ; but no certain conclusions have been reached 
as to who the Mycenaeans were. Tsountas has given an admirably 
comprehensive survey of Mycenaean antiquities ; but no work 
equals in audacious suggestiveness Professor Ridgeway's volume? 
on the ' Early Age of Greece.' Unlike Hall, who pronounces the 
Mycenaeans to have been Achaeans, he contends that the Pelasgi 
were the original inhabitants of Greece and authors of the Myce- 
naean civilisation, and were afterwards conquered successively by 
the Achaeans and the Dorians. The Homeric problem continues to 
exert an irresistible attraction ; but no positive results have been 
established. ' We shall never know,' declares Holm categori- 
cally, 'whether Homer existed, who he was, or what he wrote.' 
Wolf placed the introduction of writing centuries too late, and 
Lachmann's theory of an aggregate of ballads is equally untenable. 
Andrew Lang restated the case for the unity of Homer, and Pro- 
fessor Gilbert Murray has given a fascinating sketch of the rise 
of the Greek epic from the opposite standpoint. No work has 
done more to reconstruct the Homeric age than Helbig's analysis 
of the archaeological evidence. Berard has written a brilliant 
sketch of the Odyssey in the light of geographical knowledge 
and the explorations of the Phoenicians. The period between 
Homer and Solon is still very dark, as there are scarcely any 
inscriptions before the Persian wars. But the excavation of 
Sparta has shown the Dorian capital to be more artistic than had 
been thought. The late origin of the legend of Lycurgus has been 
established, and the famous constitution is found to have been 
the result of long development. Fresh light has been thrown 
on the Persian wars in Delbruck's ' History of the Art of War,' 
and more recently by Grundy. We have travelled far from 
the sestheticism of Curtius, and the Athenian Empire is now 



CHAP. 
XXIV 



486 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, discussed in the light of the problem of the food supply. A 
XXIV brilliant picture of the political and economic life of the Athenian 
Commonwealth in the fifth century has recently been painted by 
Zimmern. 

If we now look at Greece less through Athenian spectacles, 
and increasing attention is paid to the period which followed 
the fall of the Athenian Empire, it is largely due to the com- 
manding personality of Droysen, 1 whose ' Alexander the Great ' 
appeared in 1833. Droysen inquired not what he destroyed 
but what he had created. The new perspective led to a widely 
different judgment, and the interaction of East and West was 
pronounced to have inaugurated a richer historic life. The 
Macedonians were a kindred race, and Demosthenes was the 
worst friend of his country. Though the young historian, only 
twenty-four years old, was almost intoxicated by the glory 
of his hero, he first revealed his world-historic influence. In 
later editions the exuberance was toned down and the sources 
more critically handled ; and the book, which possesses something 
of the power and passion of Mommsen, still retains its place. 
After launching the ' Alexander ' he proceeded to trace the 
fortunes of his successors. ' In my opinion,' he wrote to Welcker, 
' no period of such importance has been so much neglected as that 
which I have ventured to christen Hellenism.' It was his intention 
to survey the era as a whole, its culture and religion no less than 
its wars and its rulers ; but he began with political history and 
never went further. The ' History of Hellenism ' is an imposing 
fragment, not the panoramic survey of his dreams. Even 
Droysen could not make the struggles and the rivalries of the 
Diadochi attractive ; but he keeps steadily before the reader 
the significance of an age pregnant with great issues. Carefully 
revised in later life in the intervals of other studies, his volumes 
continue to occupy an honourable place in historical literature. 
A far more scholarly work than Droysen 's ' Alexander ' was 
Schafer's massive monograph on Demosthenes, the finest 
monument ever raised to the genius and wisdom of the great 
orator. Niese's ' History of Greece from the battle of Chseronea,' 
a convenient political narrative, warmly eulogises the character 
and statesmanship of Alexander. Karst, on the other hand, in 
his ' History of the Hellenistic Age,' while praising the moderation 
of Philip, depicts his son as consumed with a mad ambition for 
divinity and the conquest of the world. But however opinions 
of the conquerors may differ, it is now realised that Chaeronea 
was not the end of Greek history but the beginning of the world- 

1 See G. Droysen, /. G. Droysen, vol. L, 1910. 



GREECE AND BYZANTIUM 487 

mission of Hellenism. For the story of the leagues Freeman's CHAP, 
volume on Federal Government is still unsurpassed ; and XXIV 
Professor Ferguson has recently issued from Harvard the first 
adequate study of Hellenistic Athens. No human being can 
make interesting the broken fragments of Alexander's empire ; 
but Bevan's volumes on the House of Seleucus, Lumbroso's 
study of the economic conditions of Egypt and Bouche-Leclercq's 
detailed picture of the Ptolemies are important contributions to 
an eventful period. The writings of Mahaffy on the politics 
and culture of the Hellenistic age have done much to instruct 
Anglo-Saxon readers. 

Though Greek institutions have been the theme of numerous 
monographs, no work corresponding to Mommsen's ' Staatsrecht,' 
which Wilamowitz has declared the most urgent of needs, has been 
attempted ; for the multiplicity and variety of States render a 
synthetic view peculiarly difficult. Bockh's treatise on Athens 
and the study of legal procedure by his pupils Meier and Scho- 
mann, which appeared only a few years later, maintain their 
authority in a revised form. The handbooks of Schomann and 
K. F. Hermann have received the compliment of new editions 
long after their authors' death. A more recent summary has been 
attempted by Gilbert, and Dr. Phillipson has recently explored 
the theory and practice of international law. The discovery 
of the laws of Gortyn in Crete has enhanced the respect of the 
modern world for the juristic capacity of the Greeks. 

The volume of effort directed to the study of Greek culture 
is enormously greater than that devoted to Rome. A detailed 
survey is too vast for any man, and has never been seriously 
attempted. The nearest approach is to be found in the volumes 
of Burckhardt, which combine conspicuous merits with grave 
faults. Mahaffy's studies of Greek Life and Thought remain 
the best popular introduction ; but for an adequate handling 
of the different provinces we must turn to the labours of 
specialists. The exploration of Greek philosophy l was first 
raised above the mere collection of material b}^ Tennemann, 
whose work reigned supreme in the early decades of the nineteenth 
century. During the thirties a further step was taken by the 
almost simultaneous appearance of three works. Brandis 
published a penetrating analysis of pre-Socratic thinkers, and 
Heinrich Ritter compiled a survey of ancient philosophy marked 
by irreproachable scholarship and lucid presentation ; but both 
alike failed to establish a logical connection between thinker 
and thinker. It was this task which Hegel first attempted to 

1 See Zeller's Kleine Schriften, vol. L, 1910. 



488 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, fulfil in his Lectures, which applied the dialectic process to the 
XXIV succession of schools. But the work made no claim to expert 
scholarship, and his construction, though always suggestive, was 
often arbitrary. A far greater advance was made in 185 1 with 
Zeller's ' Philosophy of the Greeks,' still by far the best survey 
of Greek thought in its organic development and one of the 
glories of German scholarship. More recently Gomperz' ' Greek 
Thinkers ' has won almost equal popularity. 

The study of religion is a much more formidable affair. 
The works of Preller, Welcker and Maury are still useful for 
their summaries of the literary sources. The contention of 
Adalbert Kuhn and Max Miiller, resting on comparative philo- 
logy, that Greek mythology was part of the common stock of 
the Indo-Germanic races and was mainly solar theory no longer 
finds supporters. The tendency to separate Greece from the 
Aryan family has been pushed further by Gruppe. In the 
difficult task of recovering the evolution of belief no scholars 
have shown more flair than Usener and Dieterich. The inscrip- 
tions have led to a more correct valuation of some of the cults, 
some of which, like that of Zeus of Dodona, prove to have been 
occupied only with trivialities. Apollo has ceased to be a Dorian 
or even a Greek deity and has been annexed by Lycia. An 
encyclopaedic survey of the cults of the Greek States has been 
undertaken by Farnell. The study of the Mysteries has been 
vigorously pursued. Though Creuzer's notion that they embodied 
a mass of esoteric truth was destroyed once and for all by Lobeck, 
it is clear that they supplied the emotional nourishment which 
the cults were unable to provide, resembling the Christian 
Sacraments and miracle plays, offering scenes and rites, not 
doctrines or theology. In this dim world, where Orpheus and 
Dionysus hold sway, Foucart and Reitzenstein, Cornford and 
Miss Harrison have trodden with undaunted footsteps. Rohde's 
masterpiece, 'Psyche,' the most perfect monograph on any 
aspect of Greek religion, traces the conception of immortality 
through the ages. Many themes are treated with brilliant 
originality in the voluminous writings of Salomon Reinach. 
Frazer has interpreted the testimony of Pausanias, and the de- 
tailed results of modern scholarship must be sought in Roscher's 
great 'Dictionary of Mythology.' The study of art has made 
rapid progress with the advance of excavation. Perrot and 
Chipiez have treated Greece against a broad background in 
their encyclopaedic survey of antiquity. Furtwangler exhaus- 
tively studied Mycenaean gems, and his fascinating ' Master- 
pieces of Greek Sculpture,' with its audacious attributions, has 



GREECE AND BYZANTIUM 489 

stimulated research where it has not carried conviction. Brunn CHAP, 
and Colhgnon have traced the evolution of sculpture. The XXIV 
course of literature has been followed by Jebb and the Croiset 
brothers, Christ and Mahaffy. New territory has been brought 
into cultivation by Susemihl's massive study of Alexandrian 
literature and Rohde's monograph on the Greek novel. 

The sources of Greek history are increasing every year. 
Bockh's Corpus contained 8,000 inscriptions, a smaller number 
than the Attic Corpus alone, itself only a part of the great 
collection which the Berlin Academy has undertaken with the 
assistance of Paris and Vienna. Their decipherment owes 
much to Kirchhoff s brilliant studies of the alphabet, distin- 
guishing localities and dates by the formation of letters, and 
to the scholarship of Ulrich Kohler. 1 The Papyri 3 and the 
Ostraka have fructified every department of the Hellenistic 
world, though rather in the fields of administration and culture 
than of politics. The technique of excavation has been per- 
fected, and the foundation of archaeological schools at Athens 
has ensured a supply of zealous and competent workers. 3 The 
French, under the direction of Homolle, removed the village 
under which lay Delphi, and explored the island of Delos. The 
Americans, after excavating the Herasum at Argos, have 
begun to reveal Corinth. The British School's explorations 
at Sparta have been rewarded by discoveries of the highest 
value for the religion and art of the Dorian capital. In 
recovering the history of their own land Greek scholars have 
taken an active part. 4 The Archaeological Society has discovered 
the pre-Mycenaean remains of the Acropolis, excavated Epidaurus 
and Dodona, and completed the labours of the French at Eleusis. 
The newly founded Macedonian Exploration Fund should reap a 
rich harvest in a neglected field. Across the seas the remains of 
civilisation in Cyprus have been recovered by Ohnefalsch- 
Richter, and the city of Naucratis on the Egyptian coast, founded 
in the seventh century but killed by the competition of Alexandria, 
has been unearthed by Flinders Petrie. A matchless collection 
of gems and jewellery has been brought to light in the tombs 

1 For a good popular sketch see Newton, ' On Greek Inscriptions,' in 
Essays on Art and Archaeology, 1880. 

2 Wilcken, Die Griechischen Papyrusurkunden, 1897, gives an excellent 
sketch of papyrology. 

3 See Michaelis, Archaeological Discoveries in the Nineteenth Century, 
1908 ; Percy Gardner, New Chapters in Greek History, 1892; and Radet 
L'Histoire de I'Ecole francaise d'Aihenes, 1901. 

4 See Theodore Reinach's chapter in Greece in Evolution, ed. Abbott 
1909. 



490 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, of the Crimea by Russian archaeologists. Dorpfeld has com- 
XXIV p]eted the exploration of Troy and shown the bottom city to 
be pre-Mycenaean. Humann has explored Pergamum ; and 
the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders 
of the ancient world, discovered by Wood in 1873, has been 
further unearthed by Hogarth. To the Politeia have been 
added in recent years the poems of Bacchylides and Herondas, 
fragments of Sappho and Pindar, speeches of Hypereides, 800 
lines of Theopompus, and considerable sections of Menander and 
Euripides. No site has yielded so rich a harvest as Oxyrhynchus, 
and in 1911 Dr. Hunt was able to announce the discovery of half 
a drama of Sophocles. Though the finds are often of no great 
moment, they represent collectively a real addition to our 
knowledge of a civilisation in regard to which every grain of 
information is gold. 

IV 

The nineteenth century witnessed no more important develop- 
ment in the field of scholarship than the revival of interest in 
the Eastern Empire. Byzantine studies 1 were founded in the 
seventeenth century by Ducange ; but the seed did not germinate 
for two hundred years. The eighteenth century, unjust to the 
Middle Ages as a whole, showed itself particularly hostile to the 
Greek Empire. For Voltaire Byzantine history was a series of 
horrible and disgusting facts, for Montesquieu a tissue of rebellion, 
seditions and perfidy. The vast compilation of their country- 
man Lebeau confirmed the popular impression of its repulsive 
dullness, and his unhappy title, the ' Lower Empire,' has stuck. 
Worse than all Gibbon failed to realise its true character and 
importance. The chapters on Justinian are incomparable ; 
but after Heraclius his interest wanes, and he marches a long 
series of colourless figures wearily across the stage. It is a 
' tedious and uniform tale of weakness and misery,' a corrupt and 
effeminate State with a thin veneer of civilisation. Of its 
services to civilisation, of the greatness of many of its figures, 
of its busy intellectual life, he had no conception. 

General interest was first aroused by a controversy as to the 
racial derivation of modern Greeks. The War of Independence 
had won the sympathy of Europe ; and it was a rude shock both 

1 See Diehl, ' Les Etudes Byzantines en France,' Byzantinische Zeit- 
schrift, 1900; Diehl, 'Les Eludes d'Histoire Byzantine en 1901,' Revue de 
Synthase Historique, vol. iii. ; and Krumbacher, Geleitwort zur Byzant. 
Zeitschrift, reprinted in his Popular e Aufsdtze, 1909. 



GREECE AND BYZANTIUM 491 

to Greece and to her champions when Fallmerayer 1 announced CHAP. 
that her inhabitants were virtually Slavs. The race of the Hellenes, XXIV 
he declared in his ' History of Morea,' was rooted out, and Athens 
was unoccupied from the sixth to the tenth century. Only its 
literature and a few ruins survived to tell that the Greek people 
had ever existed. What the Slavs had begun the Albanians had 
completed. Scholars had been so busy with the ancient Greeks 
that they had never inquired what had become of them. Leake 
had discovered a great number of Slavonic place names, but he 
had drawn no conclusions. ' I now lay the foundations of a 
new view of Greek history and of the whole peninsula.' He 
recalls the invasions of the Huns, the Bulgars and the Slavs, 
and the second volume shows the Morea flooded by Albanian 
colonists and finally conquered by the Turks. Modern Athens 
was an Albanian city, and Greece was on the level of Europe 
in the Middle Ages. The attack was naturally resented with 
intense bitterness by the Greeks ; and the excitement in the 
world of scholarship was scarcely less. For a time his array 
of evidence carried conviction ; and though his works are no 
longer read except by the curious student, his place among 
the founders of Byzantine studies is secure. 

Reviewing his critics in later life Fallmerayer declared that 
Finlay, 2 unlike his own countrymen, wrote like a gentleman ; 
and he was among the first to hail the work of the English his- 
torian. Owing in part to his friendship with a Greek fellow- 
student at Gottingen, Finlay resolved to visit Greece and judge 
for himself the condition of the people and the chances of the 
war. In 1823 he was with Byron in Missolonghi. ' You are 
young and enthusiastic,' said the poet, ' and you are sure to be 
disappointed when you know the Greeks as well as I do.' The 
prophecy was to come tine. When independence was achieved 
he bought an estate in Attica. ' I lost my money and my labour, 
but I learned how the system of tenths has produced a state of 
society and habits of cultivation against which one man can do 
nothing. When I had wasted as much money as I possessed, 
I turned my attention to study.' His life-work appeared as 
a series of monographs between 1844 and 1861. His closing 
years were devoted to a thorough revision, and to the continua- 
tion of the narrative to 1864. After his death his volumes were 
issued as a single work under the title of ' A History of Greece 

1 See his biography in Ges. Werke, vol. L, 1861. 

2 See the brief autobiography in Tozer's edition, vol. L, 1877. There 
are warm eulogies of his work in Freeman Historical Essays, Third Series, 
1879, and Fallmerayer, Ges. Werke, vol. iii., 1861. 



492 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, from its Conquest by the Romans.' Freeman boldly described 
XXIV it in 1855 as the greatest work of English historical literature 
since Gibbon, and the most original history in the language. 
The greatest of critics, Krumbacher, warmly praised the know- 
ledge of Greek character and the narrative talent. 

Finlay courageously chose an unpopular subject and claimed 
attention for it. Beginning where historians of classical Greece 
left off, he surveyed the Byzantine Empire from beginning to end, 
and continued his story for four centuries after its fall. Though 
Greece is always in the foreground, he offers a fairly complete 
summary of the history of the Eastern Empire. He showed that 
the government reached a far higher standard than any other 
State during the Middle Ages, and maintained that the moral 
condition of the people under the Iconoclasts was superior to 
that of any equal number of human beings, at the time or 
earlier, in any part of the world. Law was highly developed, 
order was fairly maintained, justice was tolerably administered. 
On the other hand he freely admits the fiscal oppression and 
the unprogressive centralisation which sterilised the Empire. 
The most novel feature of the work was the emphasis on social 
and economic conditions. He was, indeed, rather a student of 
law and economics than a professed historical scholar, and his 
personal knowledge of the evils of independent Greece led him 
to trace their influence back through the centuries. He wrote 
without any exaggerated sympathy for the Greek people. 
He relates the capture of Constantinople in 1453 without 
emotion, praises Mohammed II, and proclaims the mora' 
superiority of the Turks at the time of the conquest. But he 
draws a sinister picture of Turkish rule, of which the tribute of 
Christian children was the keystone. In the account of the 
War of Independence he castigates the leaders, while admiring 
the patriotism and endurance of the people. Though his picture 
of contemporary Greece is highly critical, he concludes by 
admitting that her progress since the war was as great as could 
reasonably be hoped. 

Finlay pointed out the speculative character of much of 
Fallmerayer's evidence ; but it was the work of Hopf, who 
begins with Alaric's invasion, to refute the contention of whole- 
sale racial displacement. His profound researches were buried 
in Ersch and Gruber's Encyclopaedia, and are in consequence 
entirely unknown to the general reader ; yet no one has done 
so much to place the study of the Greek Middle Ages on a secure 
foundation, and his narrative of the Frank domination is still 
indispensable. His results have filtered into the text-books 



GREECE AND BYZANTIUM 493 

through the medium of Hertzberg, whose history of Greece from CHAP, 
the close of the classical age presents the researches of other XXIV 
men in a well-ordered narrative. The same story has been 
told from a Greek standpoint by Paparrigopoulos. Gfrorer's 
'Byzantine Histories,' edited with the help of his lecture notes 
after his death, contain a mass of material illustrating the life 
of the Empire before the Crusades. 

The epoch of narratives gave way to the epoch of monographs 
about 1870. The lead in Byzantine studies, which had hitherto 
been taken by Germany and England, now reverted to France 
with the publication of Rambaud's ' Constantine Porphyrogeni- 
tus.' Though only a study of a single ruler, the book embodied 
a definite conception of Byzantine history. Autocracy and 
administrative centralisation, he declared, were essential, as 
the Empire was always on a war footing ; the union of Church 
and State was necessary, because the Empire could only disarm 
the barbarians by Christianity ; its rulers were often compelled 
to bribery and deceit, as they had to deal with barbarous and 
faithless tribes. ' We have been pitiless for its vices without 
noticing the virtues which it must have possessed to survive the 
Western Empire for a thousand years.' No European State, he 
adds, had to meet such assaults. Rambaud possessed every 
qualification for the historian of the Byzantine Empire ; but he 
turned to other studies and seldom revisited the field where he 
won his fame. His lead was followed by Schlumberger, who, after 
winning reputation by a treatise on the ' Coins of the Latin Orient,' 
published his sumptuous work on ' Byzantine Sigillography ' in 
1884. The volume, enriched by over a thousand illustrations, 
proved of immense value for iconography, the dignitaries and 
ceremonies of the Court, the geography and administrative 
divisions of the Empire. It was largely with the aid of monu- 
mental sources that he carried out the series of richly illustrated 
monographs on Byzantine rulers by which he is best known. 
The first was devoted to Nicephorus Phocas, whom he rescues 
from the absurd imputations of Liutprand; a second to the 
towering personality of Basil, the ' Slayer of the Bulgarians ' ; the 
final volume to Basil's successors. Though these great biographies 
only cover a century, they reveal every aspect of the life of the 
Empire and are amply sufficient to destroy the tradition of a 
nerveless and decadent State. The third French scholar to 
dedicate himself to the Eastern Empire is Diehl, who was trained 
in the French Schools at Athens and Rome. Beginning with 
studies of administration in the Exarchate of Ravenna and in 
Africa, he wrote a superbly illustrated survey of Justinian and 



494 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, the civilisation of the sixth century. A separate monograph 
XXIV on Theodora pictures a woman of strong will and rare intelligence, 
outliving her stormy youth and leaving a memory deeply 
cherished by Justinian. His study of Byzantine art is the best 
survey of a fascinating territory. No scholar has done more to 
popularise Byzantine history, and his work has been rewarded 
by his appointment as first holder of the Chair of Byzantine 
History created at the Sorbonne in 1899. 

In England Byzantine studies have been little pursued since 
Finlay ; but Professor Bury's erudite narratives and his edition 
of Gibbon give him a place in the front rank of scholars. Bussell 
has discussed the constitutional history of the Empire. William 
Miller and Sir Rennell Rodd have illumined the darkness of 
mediaeval Greece, and Sir Edwin Pears has reconstructed the 
tragedies of 1204 and 1453. By far the greatest of German 
Byzantinists was Krumbacher, for whom a chair was founded 
in Munich in 1892. His encyclopaedic survey of Byzantine 
Literature is beyond comparison the most important single work 
in the field of Byzantine study. Far from being a mere analytical 
catalogue of writers, it throws light on every aspect of the Empire. 
Of no less service was his creation of the Byzantinische 
Zeitschrift. In a long series of works Zacharia von Lingenthal 
explored the territory, unknown even to Savigny, of Byzantine 
law. Pichler traced the separation of the Eastern and Western 
Churches, and Hergenrother's mighty monograph on Photius 
threw light on every part of the early history of the Empire. 
Gelzer investigated Byzantine chronography and Hirsch the 
chroniclers of the ninth and tenth centuries. Gregorovius 
related the fortunes of mediaeval Athens, and Rohricht devoted 
a laborious life to the Crusades. Heyd's exhaustive investigation 
of Levantine trade illustrated the commercial history of the 
Empire and the fortunes of the foreign settlements. In Slavonic 
Europe interest grew apace when it was realised that the history 
of the Slavs is unintelligible without a knowledge of Byzantine 
culture. A Byzantine Review was founded by Russian scholars 
in 1894, and an Institute of Archaeology was created at Constan- 
tinople. The most original treatises on Byzantine art are the 
work of Strzygowski, an Austrian Pole, now Professor at Vienna, 
whose claims for the wide extension of Byzantine influence in 
the West have led to prolonged discussion. 

Byzantine studies have made immense progress in the last 
half-century ; but the territory is so vast that there is even 
now no more promising field of historical research. The 
Byzantine Corpus, which began to appear at Bonn under the 



GREECE AND BYZANTIUM 495 

auspices of Niebuhr, was so imperfectly edited as to be of slender CHAP. 
value ; and it is only in the last three decades that scholarly XXIV 
editions of the sources have become available. No work has 
been the subject of so much controversy as the ' Historia Secreta ' ; 
but Dahn's view that it was indeed the work of Procopius is 
now generally accepted. In 1904 the International Association 
of Academies determined on a Corpus of Greek mediaeval 
charters. There are now Byzantine Chairs at Paris and Munich, 
Leyden and Leipsic, St. Petersburg, Odessa and Buda-Pesth. 
From the scholarship of two generations a new Byzantium l 
has emerged, not inert and decadent, but the mother of great 
statesmen and soldiers, the home of culture while central and 
western Europe was plunged in darkness, the rampart of Christian 
Europe for a thousand years, the civiliser of the Slavonic races. 
She is no longer a degenerate descendant of Greece or a parody 
of Rome, but a Christian State with her own individuality. The 
virile Isaurians hold their own beside any dynasty of the West. 
Freeman truly remarked that it was for ages the only regular 
and systematic government in the world. Nothing but a 
centralised bureaucracy could have held together so many 
countries and races. Its administrative machine was the most 
elaborate that the world had seen, and the Byzantine Court was 
to mediaeval Europe what Louis XIV was to the rulers of the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Travellers and am- 
bassadors marvelled at the wealth and splendour of the capital, 
and felt themselves in presence of a more complex and highly 
organised civilisation. Yet there is no disposition to pass 
from the extreme of depreciation to exaggerated eulogy. The 
Eastern Empire was a bureaucratic despotism in which liberty 
was unknown. In literature it was imitative and produced no 
masterpiece. In the region of the arts alone was it creative. 
' The mission of Christian Constantinople,' declares Bikelas with 
truth, 'was not to create but to save.' To preserve Greek 
culture during the barbarism of the Middle Ages and to defend 
it against the assaults of Islam was to deserve well of civilisation. 

1 Excellently sketched by Frederic Harrison in the Rede Lecture, 
1900, reprinted in Among My Books, 1912. 



CHAPTER XXV 

THE ANCIENT EAST 

CHAP. One of the most sensational events of the nineteenth century 
XXV i s the resurrection of the Ancient East. We now know that 
Greece and Rome, far from standing near the beginning of 
recorded history, were the heirs of a long series of brilliant 
civilisations. Our whole perspective has been changed. The 
ancient world ceases to be merely the vestibule to Christian 
Europe, and becomes in point of duration the larger part of 
human history. 



The discovery of early Egypt dates from Napoleon's expedi- 
tion. 1 The country was vaguely known by the obelisks and 
mummies scattered about the capitals of Europe and by per- 
functory references in books of travel ; but interest in its life 
and art, religion and science, had been lost. The French army 
of 1798 was accompanied by a number of scholars, whose obser- 
vations were recorded in an array of magnificent volumes. 
But the inscriptions, being unintelligible, were transcribed 
with so little accuracy as to be useless to philologists. Of 
far greater importance was the discovery of a tablet while 
excavating for fortifications at the Rosetta mouth of the 
Nile. The Rosetta stone contained a sacerdotal decree award- 
ing honours to Ptolemy Epiphanes in Greek, hieroglyphics 
or the language of the priests, and demotic, the popular 
dialect. Here, then, was a key to the history and civilisa- 
tion of ancient Egypt. But who could fit it to the lock ? The 
first attack was made by Sylvestre de Sacy and Akerblad, who 

1 See Darmesteter's admirable survey, ' L'Orientalisme en France,' 
ch. iii, in Essais Orientaux, 1883 ; Hilprecht, Explorations in Bible Lands, 
1903 (the Egyptian chapter by Steindorff) ; Authority and Archceology, ed. 
Hogarth, 1899, 



THE ANCIENT EAST 



497 



identified in both versions the groups of letters which appeared CHAP, 
to correspond to the proper names, and maintained that the XXV 
writing could not be wholly ideographic, as a foreign proper name 
could not be represented by an image. But they isolated the 
names without being able to determine their elements. A far 
more successful attempt was that of Thomas Young, author of 
the undulatory theory of light. In the hieroglyphic text he 
recognised the cartouches which contained the names of Ptolemy 
and Berenice, and identified the signs answering to the sounds 
n, f, p, t, i. In the words of Maspero, Young saw visions of 
the promised land from afar, but never entered it. 

The riddle was guessed by Champollion, 1 who thereby became 
the founder of Egyptology. There is no more wonderful page in 
the annals of scholarship than the brief career of this man of 
genius. As Schliemann dreamed of Troy in his childhood, 
Champollion's thoughts turned to Egypt. Making the acquaint- 
ance of the physicist Fourier, who had taken part in the French 
expedition, the lad of eleven pored over his collections and 
listened enraptured to the traveller's tales. Chancing on a 
Coptic grammar at the age of fourteen, he threw himself into 
its study, believing that it might contain the key to the unknown. 
Quitting Grenoble for Paris he worked under Sylvestre de Sacy, 
learning Arabic and other Oriental languages. Turning to the 
problem of the Rosetta stone, he noticed that certain papyri 
began with representations of religious scenes which he also found 
at the head of hieroglyphic inscriptions. Guessing that the text 
might also be the same, he detected the same signs in the hiero- 
glyphics. Without having read a word, he had discovered that 
writing on papyrus was simply cursive hieroglyphics. But he 
was still far from his goal, and, turning from the hieroglyphics 
of the Rosetta stone, he attacked the cursive script. He unveiled 
the proper names, Berenice, Alexander and Cleopatra, which gave 
him nineteen letters, and with these he could read demotic. 
He then returned to hieroglyphics, and obtained the phonetic 
alphabet from the royal cartouches. These letters, tracked 
through the inscription, gave him a series of words very like Coptic. 
Thus the veil of Isis was raised. He had shown that hiero- 
glyphics were not ideographic but alphabetic ; that the three 
modes of writing, hieroglyphics, hieratic and demotic, formed a 
single system. The names of the rulers became legible, and the 
dynasties and monuments fell into their place. Darmesteter 
compares the rapidity and brilliance of his conquests to the career 
of the First Consul. Young belittled his rival's results, but 
1 See Hartleben's great biography, 2 vols., 1906. 



498 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. Champollion had no difficulty in showing that his alphabet was 
XXV f a i se except for five signs. Sylvestre de Sacy hailed his pupil's 
triumph, but Klaproth bitterly accused him of falsifying texts. 
' Not human criticism, but the intuition of the Divinity alone 
could work such a miracle ; and we are asked to believe that a 
single scholar has done in a few years what reason and common 
sense prove to be impossible.' This sneering attack forms the 
highest eulogy. The discoveries seemed beyond human power. 
Champollion was appointed Professor at Grenoble, but returned 
to Paris in 1826 as Keeper of the Egyptian Museum. Mean- 
while he had studied and arranged the valuable Egyptian collec- 
tions at Turin. In 1828 he visited Egypt with Rosellini under 
the auspices of the French and the Tuscan Governments. The 
tour shattered his health, but on his return to Paris in 1829 a 
Chair of Egyptian Archaeology was founded for him. He only 
delivered his inaugural lecture, and died in 1832 at the age of 
forty-one. His was the greatest as well as the earliest of the 
achievements by which the ancient East was revealed to the 
modern world. His ' Monuments of Egypt,' the fruit of his 
journey, appeared after his death, and was followed by the 
' Egyptian Grammar ' and the ' Dictionary of Hieroglyphics.' 
His supreme service was the decipherment of hieroglyphics. 
He had not thoroughly mastered demotic, which only yielded 
to the assault of Brugsch. 

The second great step in Egyptology was taken by Lepsius. 1 
After learning exact methods from Gottfried Hermann he entered 
Otfried Miiller's Seminar at Gottingen, and decided to cultivate 
the archaeological rather than the grammatical side of philology. 
Feeling the need of knowing antiquity as a whole, he heard Heeren 
as well as Ewald, Bockh as well as Bopp. For his doctor's 
degree he chose the Eugubian Tablets, seven copper plates found 
in the fifteenth century in a vault at Gubbio. The inscriptions, 
which formed the oldest monuments of an Italian tongue, made 
it possible to reconstruct the Umbrian language, and threw 
light on ritual and religion. The tablets had been analysed by 
Otfried Miiller in his book on the Etruscans, and the attention 
of Lepsius had been drawn to them by his beloved master. By 
carrying the discussion of the problem far beyond where Miiller 
had left it, he proved his capacity for deciphering unknown 
tongues. He completed his student's career by a year in Paris, 
where he attended the lectures of Letronne, who questioned 
many of the results of Champollion. He now received an invita- 
tion to Italy from Bunsen, who desired him to study the Egyp- 

1 See Ebers' charming biography, Richard Lepsius, Eng. trans., 1887. 



THE ANCIENT EAST 499 

tian language. Before accepting he decided to inquire whether CHAP. 
Champollion's work rested on a firm foundation. The result of XXV 
his investigations was satisfactory, and the splendid possibilities 
of Egyptology burst upon him. He learned Coptic, and then 
attacked demotic and hieroglyphics. Bunsen and Humboldt 
watched over him with fatherly care, and procured a grant from 
the Berlin Academy. Rosellini sent him his results, and he was 
allowed access to the manuscripts of Champollion. After exhaust- 
ng the resources of Paris, he examined the treasures of Turin, 
above all the papyrus list of the kings. Bunsen believed that 
he had found the man to continue the work of Champollion. He 
was then planning his work on ' Egypt's Place in History,' and 
was anxious that the young scholar should collaborate. The 
plan was not to be realised, but the two men formed a life- 
long friendship. 

In 1837 Lepsius published his ' Letter to Rosellini,' confirming 
the main discoveries of Champollion and rejecting the methods of 
his critics. The unlocking of the treasure-house was the signal 
for a number of ill-equipped scholars to rush in. ' It was his merit 
to insist on the application of strict critical methods, and to sweep 
away fancies and speculations with ruthless severity. In 1842 he 
sketched out the ' Book of Kings,' to which he made additions 
after his visit to Egypt. He also occupied himself with mythology, 
marshalling the motley throng of deities into ordered ranks. On 
his first visit to Turin he had realised that most of the religious 
texts on monuments, mummies and papyri belonged to a work 
which he christened the ' Book of the Dead,' a thorough study 
of which was obviously necessary to the comprehension of my- 
thology. In 1842 he published the Turin papyrus in facsimile, 
and, though it was a late and faulty copy, the book remained 
supreme till Naville published the best texts forty years later. 
When Lepsius asked Bunsen to procure help for a visit to Egypt, 
the minister promised to do his best. Humboldt supported 
the application, and the accession of Frederick William IV in 
1840 made the project practicable. A Chair of Egyptology was 
created for him at Berlin, and the plan of a private journey 
ripened into that of a scientific expedition. Before starting he 
definitely renounced all participation in Bunsen's work. In 
the interests of his fame it was wise to separate himself from the 
enterprise of an imaginative amateur. 

Lepsius landed in Egypt at the end of 1842, having learned 
all that Europe could teach him. Mehemet Ali gave him a free 
hand in excavation, and presented to the King of Prussia what- 
ever he cared to select. The expedition sent home about 15,000 

2 k 2 



500 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, antiquities and plaster casts. Three tombs were dispatched 
XXV from Memphis, columns from Thebes and Philae, obelisks, 
statues, sarcophagi, papyri and innumerable other objects, 
which made the Berlin Museum one of the finest in the world. 
The story of the expedition, which lasted three years, was told by 
its leader in his ' Letters from Egypt, Ethiopia and the Peninsula 
of Sinai.' Making a long stay at Memphis, the importance of 
which Champollion had overlooked, he explored the Old Empire, 
discovered over one hundred tombs, separated the twelfth from 
the eighteenth dynasty, dated the invasion of the Hyksos, and in- 
vestigated the methods of construction employed in the Pyramids. 
The inscriptions at Philae enabled him to determine the order 
of the Ptolemies, and he studied the Nile valley beyond the First 
Cataract, visiting Meroe and opening up the civilisation of 
Ethiopia. He passed six months at Thebes, rejoicing in the mighty 
rulers of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties. After a visit 
to the Sinai peninsula he returned home laden with precious spoil. 
His highest expectations had been exceeded. He was appointed 
Director of the Egyptian Museum, of which he was virtually 
the creator, and the King supplied funds for the publication of 
his results, which appeared in twelve gigantic volumes contain- 
ing nearly a thousand plates. The ' Monuments of Egypt and 
Ethiopia ' contains an inexhaustible treasure of inscriptions, 
maps, sketches and pictures, many of them in colour. Marginal 
notes state the locality and the reign, but there is no explanatory 
text. The ' Book of Kings,' begun before the Egyptian journey and 
published in 1852, is therefore an almost indispensable companion. 
In the words of Ebers, it is and must ever remain the chief and 
most fundamental work for the study of Egyptology. 

An intelligible view of Egyptian history was impossible 
without a secure chronological basis. Several attempts had been 
recently made, notably in Bunsen's ' Egypt's Place in Universal 
History ' and Bockh's study of Manetho. The incomparable 
treatise of Lepsius on the ' Chronology of the Egyptians,' published 
in 1849, res ted not only on a study of the monuments but on 
an attempt to reconstruct the work of Manetho, the Ptolemaic 
historian. Though it made no claim to be a narrative, it is his 
enduring achievement to have firmly outlined the history of 
Egypt. His later life was occupied by incessant work and 
travel. On revisiting Egypt in 1866 he discovered the 
Tablet of Canopus, a long inscription in hieroglyphics, demotic 
and Greek, which proved that the decipherment of the Rosetta 
stone and of other texts on the same principles was correct. 
At the age of seventy he published a Nubian Grammar, at which 



THE ANCIENT EAST 501 

he had worked since his visit to Ethiopia, and the introduction CHAP, 
to which surveys in broad perspective the nations and languages XXV 
of Africa. Working busily to the end, and loaded with honours 
from the learned societies of the world, Lepsius died in 1884 
at the age of seventy-four. He accomplished more for 
Egyptology than anyone except its founder. His clearness of 
thought, cautious methods and exact scholarship render his 
work peculiarly solid. With the exception of Brugsch, all the 
great German scholars who have carried on his work, Ebers and 
Diimichen, Erman and Wiedemann, were his pupils. ' Lepsius 
was one of the last survivors of our heroic age,' wrote Maspero 
on his death. ' For long he had been the master of us all. I 
only hope that when I die I may be held to have done for our 
science one half as much as he.' 

Shortly after Lepsius returned from his expedition, Mariette l 
arrived in the country with which his name is imperishably 
associated. A few weeks later he discovered the Serapeum, 
the burying-place of the sacred Apis bulls in Memphis, which 
Lepsius had believed to be destroyed. He found sixty-four 
tombs ranging from the eighteenth dynasty to the Ptolemies, 
with innumerable ornaments and the offerings of pilgrims. He 
then unearthed the temple of the Sphinx. He returned to Paris 
in 1853, intending to publish a full account of his discoveries; 
but though he had rapidly classified them he was too little of a 
scholar for exact interpretation, and only a brief description 
appeared. In 1857 ne was named by the Khedive Director of 
Antiquities, and founded the Museum at Bulak. He found 
hundreds of tombs at Memphis and Sakkara, excavated the sacred 
city of Abydos, explored the Ptolemaic temples at Dendera and 
Edfu, and cleared out the palaces of Medinet Habu and Der el 
Behari in the hills near Thebes. Though his methods of work 
were somewhat crude, Mariette was the first and greatest of the 
excavators to whom we owe the resurrection of ancient Egypt. 
He was not a consummate philologist, and he needed other men 
to interpret his discoveries. He regarded the Museum as his 
greatest achievement. Knowing where his best work could be 
done, he wisely refused the offer of the Chair of Egyptology at 
the College de France. ' Mariette,' said Brugsch, his devoted 
friend and colleague, ' was more a poet than a scholar. He was 
weak in deciphering hieroglyphics, and was fully conscious of 
the uncertainty of his renderings. He confessed freely that he 

1 See Maspero's ' Notice biographique ' in Mariette, (Euvres Diverses, 
vol. i., 1904, and G. Charmes, L'£gypte, 1891. Both were personal 
friends. 



502 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, had absolutely no gift for the philological side of the science, 

xxv and deeply lamented it.' . 

Mariette stands beside Champollion and Lepsius as the third 
great figure in Egyptology. His supreme achievement was to 
reveal the Old Empire, of which he has been truly described as 
the Columbus. His discovery of royal tombs of the sixth dynasty 
at Sakkara brought to light the first long religious texts of the 
Old Empire, the ' Book of the Dead ' belonging to the Middle and 
the New. He showed that its art and civilisation, far from being 
primitive, were highly developed, and that it was itself the cul- 
mination of ages of development. ' Mariette,' writes Darmesteter, 
' had to struggle not only with the unknown but with nature and 
with man. His thirty years of triumph are years of incessant 
and devouring conflict with fever, stupidity, apathy and 
prejudice. He had to perform prodigies of diplomacy to force 
the foolish possessors of these treasures to understand their 
value. The monopoly of discoveries saved Egypt from the 
utter ruin which another century of tourists and speculators 
in antiquities would have consummated.' When he died, the 
Khedive sent a granite sarcophagus for his remains. ' He sleeps, 
guarded by four sphinxes from the Serapeum, at the entrance 
to his museum, on the threshold of the forty centuries restored 
by his genius.' 

Champollion's death had been followed by a good deal of 
fanciful speculation, and it was not till de Rouge l that Egyptology 
in France again began to advance on sound lines. It was charac- 
teristic that his first important work should be a criticism of 
the ambitious synthesis of Bunsen. The worth of his scholarly 
monographs was recognised by his appointment as Conservator 
of Egyptian Monuments, and in i860 he succeeded to the Chair 
of Egyptology. When he paid a long visit to Egypt, Mariette 
acted as his cicerone. Though his name is connected neither 
with sensational discoveries nor with comprehensive treatises, 
his services to scientific Egyptology are rated highest by those 
most qualified to judge them. A still more brilliant philologist 
was Brugsch, 2 the second great German Egyptologist. The 
publication of his ' Demotic Grammar ' in 1848 brought him at a 
bound into the front rank of scholars, and, acting on the advice 
of Humboldt, FrederickWilliam IV sent him to Egypt to decipher 
demotic inscriptions. He was with Mariette when the Serapeum 

1 See Maspero's biography in Rouge's CEuvres Diverses, vol. i., 1907, 
and Wallon's £loges, vol. L, 1882. 

2 See his autobiography, Mein Leben u, Wandern, 1894, and Naville's 
article in Alls. Deutsche Bios. 



THE ANCIENT EAST 503 

was brought to light, and formed a lifelong friendship with the CHAP, 
prince of excavators. His relations with Lepsius were strained and XXV 
sometimes openly hostile. When Humboldt, the friend and patron 
of both, attempted to secure the appointment of the younger 
scholar as Director of the Berlin Museum, Lepsius announced 
that he would resign his professorship and leave the capital unless 
the post was awarded to himself. But he publicly expressed 
his admiration of Brugsch's greatest work, the ' Dictionary of 
Hieroglyphics and Demotic,' and declared that there was nothing 
like it in Egyptology. Lepsius worked methodically and 
advanced step by step, while Brugsch proceeded by intuition, 
loving bold combinations and paradoxes. Ebers, the friend and 
pupil of both, declares Brugsch far superior as a decipherer and 
investigator of the evolution of Egyptian languages. Eduard 
Meyer has pronounced him the equal of Champollion in genius, 
many-sidedness and divinatory instinct. While Lepsius con- 
fined himself to inscriptions, Brugsch boldly grappled with 
manuscripts. 

Though above all a philologist, Brugsch made the first de- 
tailed attempt to narrate the history of Egypt from contemporary 
records. Lepsius, he declared, had done all that was possible 
to one starting from Manetho ; but the monuments had largely 
discredited the Ptolemaic priest. The book is liberally supplied 
with translations from inscriptions and papyri. The Early and 
Middle Empires are sketched without great detail ; but half the 
first volume is devoted to the eighteenth dynasty, which became 
fully known to the cultured world through his pen. The work 
enjoyed wide popularity ; but it was not wholly satisfactory, 
being too largely composed of texts and too liberal in hypothesis. 
A third scholar associated with Mariette was Dumichen. 1 When 
the great excavator uncovered the temple of Seti at Abydos, he 
did not pause to examine in detail the treasures which it con- 
tained. Shortly after Dumichen, then on his first visit to Egypt, 
discovered on the walls a table of the Kings — Seti and his son 
Rameses II making offering to a long line of ancestors. This 
perfectly preserved list became the main foundation of Egyptian 
chronology. 

The closest friend of Mariette's later years was Maspero, who 
succeeded him as the Director of the Museum and of Egyptian 
Antiquities. Like Champollion, he showed a taste for hiero- 
glyphics while still at school. In 1867 he met Mariette, who was 
then in Paris in connection with the exhibition. The famous 
Egyptologist gave him two new and difficult texts to study, and 
1 See Ebers, Aegyptische Studien, 1900. 



504 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, the self-taught scholar translated them. In 1869, at the age of 
XXV twenty-three, he was appointed to teach Egyptian at the newly- 
founded Ecole des Hautes Etudes, and on the death of de Rouge 
Mariette procured him the coveted chair at the College de France, 
Visiting Egypt in 1880 as head of a mission which later deve- 
loped into the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology, he 
remained till after the death of Mariette. His first task was 
to open the Sakkara pyramids, which provided thousands of 
religious texts. His most sensational find was that of the tombs 
of the Kings of the eighteenth to the twenty-first dynasties, and 
the bodies of Seti, Rameses II and III, and Thothmes, in the 
Valley of the Kings, near Thebes, in 188 1. He superintended 
the removal of the Museum to Cairo and the publication of its 
catalogue. He first popularised Egyptology in Fr?nce. The 
works of Champollion and de Rouge had been too abstruse, 
Mariette's reports too sketchy to secure a wide circle of readers. 
In a long series of works, at once popular and scientific, he has 
illustrated the life and history of ancient Egypt. His larger and 
smaller histories of the Peoples of the East first set the picture 
in its frame. Explorer, philologist and historian, a worthy 
successor both of Mariette and de Rouge, Maspero is the greatest 
of living Egyptologists. 

Till the death of Mariette the main work of Egyptology had 
been carried on by French and Germans. It was now the turn 
of England to take the lead. British scholars had followed 
the beginnings of the new science with interest. Birch had 
been one of the earliest disciples of Champollion, and Sharpe 
wrote a history which passed through several editions and was 
translated into German. Wilkinson described the manners and 
customs of the ancient Egyptians, and Lane portrayed the Egypt 
of his day with the hand of a master. The foundation of the 
Egyptian Exploration Fund in 1883 marks the beginning of 
organised effort. The chief agent of the Society in its early years 
was Flinders Petrie, 1 who first visited Egypt in 1880. Beginning 
with the Delta, he excavated Tanis, the Zoan of the Bible, and 
identified Naukratis by its early Greek inscriptions, which re- 
vealed three centuries of Greek settlement hitherto unsuspected. 
Shortly after a second Greek city, Daphne, was discovered. He 
then turned to the Fayum, working at Hawara, where he entered 
the pyramids and discovered a cemetery with treasures ranging 
from precious gems to children's dolls. He located Lake Mceris 
and the Labyrinth and explored Tel-el-Amarna. The city of 

1 His early discoveries were summarised in Ten Years' Digging in 
Egypt, 1892, 



THE ANCIENT EAST 505 

Amenophis IV, who deserted Thebes about 1380 to free himself CHAP. 

from the power of the priests, had been sketched by Lepsius. XXV 

In 1888 fellaheen stumbled on some crumbling wooden chests 

filled with clay tablets in cuneiform, containing correspondence 

of the Egyptian Kings with Assyria and Palestine, which opened 

a new world to historians of the early East. A great Hyksos camp 

was found in 1905 twenty miles north of Cairo. A lengthening 

row of illustrated monographs, including sites in every part of 

Egypt and extending to the Sinai peninsula, bears witness to 

his fruitful labours. As an excavator he stands second only 

to Mariette for the variety and importance of his achievements. 

He is not only the greatest of English excavators but the greatest 

populariser of Egyptology in England. His co-operative ' History 

of Egypt/ of which he wrote the first four volumes, is the most 

authoritative narrative that has yet appeared. 

America has at last begun to cultivate Egyptology, and 
Breasted has written the best brief narrative of Egyptian history. 
The lofty traditions of French scholarship have been continued 
by Revillout and Amelineau, the former devoting himself to 
law, the latter to moral and religious ideas. Lumbroso has 
based a detailed review of the political and economic life of the 
Ptolemaic era on the papyri and inscriptions. Ebers l edited the 
great medical treatise of the sixteenth century B.C. known as 
the Ebers papyrus, compiled popular and sumptuously illustrated 
descriptive works, and above all presented a series of scenes 
from Egyptian history in the ' Egyptian Princess ' and numerous 
other novels which have made their way all over the world. Wiede- 
mann and Eduard Meyer have written histories, and the latter 
has devoted a classical monograph to chronology. Erman, 
the successor of Lepsius at Berlin, has painted a scholarly and 
comprehensive picture of Egyptian life in its various stages. 
Wilhelm Max Miiller has traced the intercourse of Egypt with 
her neighbours and more distant States. 

The main event of the last two decades has been the 
revelation of Egyptian origins. 2 When Maspero published his 
narrative in 1895 the story began with the pyramid-builders 
of the fourth dynasty. We have now recovered not only the 
early dynasties but neolithic and palaeolithic Egypt. Strange 
pottery and flints had long been known ; but it was not till the 
systematic examination of the primitive cemeteries between 
Abydos and Edfu by de Morgan that the existence of a stone 

1 See Edward Meyer's admirable sketch, Kleine Schriften, 1910. 

2 Admirably summarised by King and Hall, Egypt and Western Asia 
in the Light of Recent Discoveries, 1907. 



506 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, age was recognised. Petrie, who had suggested their connection 
XXV w ith Libyan invaders between the Old and Middle Empires, was 
converted, and has dated the prehistoric epochs by the pottery. 
The discovery of this primitive civilisation sets the history of 
Egypt in a new perspective. Equally recent is our knowledge 
of the first three dynasties. The invaders, who were probably 
of Semitic origin, were grouped round two centres in Upper and 
Lower Egypt, and the Kings of Hierokonpolis ultimately con- 
quered the north and formed the first dynasty. Here again light 
shines from the tombs. To the labours of de Morgan and 
Amelineau, Petrie and Quibell at Abydos and Hierokonpolis we 
owe this new chapter of ancient history. The change of capital to 
Memphis, which was founded under the first dynasty, was made 
by the third, and the systematic exploration of the vast site has 
been commenced by Petrie. The excavations of Nubian Meroe 
belong to the other end of Egyptian history. Though marvellous 
progress has been made, two great gaps remain. Darkness 
descends after the sixth dynasty, and the curtain only rises 
on the widely different world of the eleventh. In like manner 
the collapse of the Middle Empire leaves the stage in gloom, and 
though we know a little of the Hyksos our information is still 
of the scantiest. That their culture was low is clear ; that they 
left behind them a memory of loathing we learn from Manetho. Yet 
no traces of destruction wrought by them have been discovered, 
and they employed hieroglyphics and worshipped Egyptian 
gods. That they came from Asia is agreed ; but it is still in 
dispute whether they were Bedouin Arabs or a race from Asia 
Minor related to the Hittites. The chronology of the Early 
and Middle Kingdoms remains uncertain, owing to these two 
dark periods. Petrie, following the traditional computation, 
places Menes about 5000, while Erman, Eduard Meyer and 
Breasted date him at about 3400. In the absence of decisive 
evidence it may be best to follow Maspero, who rejects both 
extremes. 



II 

The discovery of Babylonian civilisation was even more sen- 
sational. 1 While remains of vanished greatness had always been 
visible in the valley of the Nile, Mesopotamia was remote and 
inaccessible, and adventurous visitors found nothing but a few 

1 The fullest account is in Hilprecht, Explorations in Bible Lands, 1903. 
Brief summaries are given in Darmesteter, Essais Orientaux, and the 
histories of Hommel, Rogers and Eduard Meyer. 



THE ANCIENT EAST 507 

mounds on the plain. Once again a vanished world has been CHAP, 
recovered by the joint exertions of the philologist and excavator. XXV 
The first step was to decipher the inscriptions collected by 
travellers. The key of cuneiform lay in the inscriptions of 
the Persian Kings at Persepolis and Susa, which were available 
in the careful transcripts of Carsten Niebuhr. In 1802 Grotefend 
identified the three languages of the Persepolis inscriptions as 
Persian, Median and Babylonian, and recovered the names of 
Darius and Xerxes ; but the Academy of Gottingen, which he 
informed of his discovery, declined to publish his memoir. It 
was not till a generation later that further progress was made by 
Burnouf and Lassen in 1836 ; but the decisive victory was won 
by Rawlinson, 1 the Champollion of cuneiform. Travelling in 
Persia in 1835 he noticed two cuneiform inscriptions in Hamadan, 
and identified the names of three Persian Kings. He now made 
acquaintance with the efforts of Grotefend, and declared that 
twenty-two of the thirty letters of his alphabet were wrong. In 
1838 he published a translation of the first two paragraphs of 
the Persian inscription at Behistun. Burnouf then sent him his 
memoir on the Hamadan inscriptions, containing several differ- 
ences in interpretation, and his researches on Zend, an early 
form of Persian though later than the inscriptions, which aided 
him in seizing the grammatical structure of the language. With 
Lassen Rawlinson began to correspond in 1838, and the two men 
found that they agreed in regard to almost every letter. He 
declared that he had only learned one letter from each ; but 
they often confirmed him when he was doubtful. 

Appointed to Bagdad as Political Agent in Turkish Arabia in 
1844, Rawlinson at once set off for Behistun. The Rosetta stone 
contained a Greek key ; but the inscription of Darius was in 
three scripts, equally unknown. Moreover while the Rosetta 
stone could be studied in comfort, the proclamation was cut on 
the side of a precipitous rock 300 feet above the plain. The 
Persian cuneiform was current in Persia, the Babylonian in 
Babylonia, while the Median was found in more than one locality. 
With immense difficulty he copied the Persian and the Median ; 
but the Babylonian version he was unable to reach. The 
Persian that his predecessors had endeavoured to decipher was 
the easiest, and it was to this that he devoted his chief attention. 
Using as his key the letters of the three names deciphered in the 
Hamadan inscriptions, Hystaspes, Darius and Xerxes, he essayed 
a translation of the whole inscription, which, with his disserta- 
tions, appeared in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. Oppert, 

1 See Canon Rawlinson, Sir H. Rawlinson, 189S. 



508 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, the most authoritative of judges, declared in 1895 that after 
XXV Rawlinson it was only possible to glean in the field of Persian 
cuneiform interpretation. He next turned his attention to the 
Babylonian script, which was far more difficult. The task was 
complicated by the discovery that there were several signs for the 
same letter and that about 300 characters were in use. Moreover, 
while in the Persian script he had predecessors, in Babylonian 
he had none. As Layard's treasures floated down the Tigris to 
Bagdad he took copies of the inscriptions, and noticed that the 
script of the Assyrian tablets was almost exactly the same as 
the Babylonian version of Behistun. He therefore made a 
second journey in 1847, and, being himself unable to reach the 
face of the rock, employed a Kurdish boy to take a squeeze. 
Nearly half the inscription was decayed and therefore conjectural ; 
but he was able to extract its main secrets. Returning to 
England in 1849, he published papers in the Journal of the Royal 
Asiatic Society on the Babylonian and Assyrian records. Ten 
years later a cylinder containing the annals of the first Tiglath- 
Pileser in 800 lines was found and submitted to Rawlinson, 
Oppert and Hincks, whose translations were virtually the same. 
The problem was now solved. Rawlinson's claims to be the main 
discoverer of the key are irrefragable. He never worked seriously 
at the Median version ; but the Persian and Babylonian capitu. 
lated at his summons. His later life was largely spent at the 
British Museum, piecing and translating broken fragments of 
clay and stone ; and with the aid of George Smith and Pinches 
he edited the great collection of ' Cuneiform Inscriptions of 
Western Asia ' for the trustees. 

While the work of decipherment was mainly due to Rawlinson, 
the placing of Assyriology on a scientific basis was above all the 
achievement of Eberhard Schrader and Friedrich Delitzsch. A 
pupil of Ewald, who spent his early life on the Old Testament, 
Schrader l published in 1872 his ' Cuneiform Inscriptions and 
the Old Testament,' the first careful discussion of the new light 
thrown on the history of the Jews. At the same time he began 
to lecture on Assyriology at Jena, whence he was shortly sum- 
moned to Berlin. Till now German scholars had been inclined 
to scoff at the new science, and Gutschmid 2 had expressed his 
scepticism before Schrader commenced to write. The Assyrio- 
logist aided Duncker with a new edition of the ' History of 
Antiquity ' ; and when the historian was challenged by Gut- 
schmid he hurried to his rescue. Gutschmid turned from Duncker 

1 See Eduard Meyer's masterly sketch, Kleine Schriften, 1910. 

2 See Ruhl's sketch in Gutschmid, Kleine Schriften, vol. v., 1894. 



THE ANCIENT EAST 509 

and delivered a violent attack on Schrader and his science in CHAP. 
his ' Assyriology in Germany.' Schrader, he declared, was an ^^- v 
enthusiast who lacked rigorous philological schooling and was 
destitute of critical instinct. The critic was more learned and 
possessed a far more powerful brain than the Berlin Professor, 
and his brilliant invective was like a dashing cavalry charge. 
He succeeded in exposing many hasty and vulnerable conclusions, 
and the result of his onslaught was to teach greater caution ; 
but the indictment was grossly exaggerated, and he shut his eyes 
to the growing volume of established fact. Schrader replied 
in his greatest work, ' Cuneiform Inscriptions and Historical 
Research.' Though a poor controversialist, his book carried 
conviction by its solid learning ; and the world of scholarship 
no longer doubted that the foundations of Assyriology were well 
and truly laid. Long before the master's death the exact 
philological methods of Delitzsch, his first and greatest pupil, 
placed the study beyond the reach of further attack. 

During the years in which Burnouf, Lassen and Rawlinson 
were deciphering cuneiform, the excavation of the remains of 
Mesopotamian civilisation was inaugurated. When Botta, the 
nephew of the Italian historian, arrived at Mosul in 1842 as 
French Consul, he set to work to excavate Khorsabad, and was 
rewarded by the discovery of the Palace of Sargon, the conqueror 
of Samaria. Many of the remains were dispatched to Paris, 
where they formed the first Assyrian Museum. The revelation of 
a rich and powerful civilisation excited world-wide interest, and 
the gigantic winged bulls aroused popular enthusiasm. Where 
Botta led the way, Layard 1 followed. While travelling in 
Mesopotamia in 1840 he cast longing glances at the mounds, 
and in 1845 he led an expedition to Nimrud, near Mosul. In 
spite of opposition from Turkish officials, he pursued his work 
and was rewarded by the discovery of a city older than Khorsabad. 
He then turned to Koujunik, the ancient Nineveh, where he 
unearthed the Palace of Sennacherib, the wall sculptures of which 
revealed the civilisation of Western Asia — dress and customs, 
hunting scenes and boats, the career and government of the King. 
The royal library contained a great collection of tablets on astro- 
nomy and astrology, records and chronological lists, hymns and 
incantations, reports on administration and State affairs. Among 
these treasures none equalled in interest that which narrated 
the Assyrian story of the Deluge. 

The startling discoveries in Assyria were quickly followed by an 

1 In addition to his descriptive writings, see his Autobiography and 
Letters, 2 vols., 1903. 



510 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, attack on Babylonia. Layard scratched the mound at Nippur, 
near Bagdad, but found little, and soon desisted. Rawlinson 
himself explored Birs Nimrud, long regarded as the Tower of 
Babel. Loftus laboured at Warka and Taylor at Ur, and Oppert 
led a French mission to Babil. But marble and stone were rare, 
and the lack of imposing remains damped the ardour of the West. 
Moreover the country was inhabited by lawless and ignorant 
tribes and was often under water. On the other hand it gradually 
became clear from the Nineveh tablets that most of the literary 
treasures of Assyria were merely copies of Babylonian originals ; 
and when the world again turned its attention to Babylonia, 
sensational discoveries awaited it. Methodical excavation was 
begun by de Sarzec, French vice-consul at Basra, in 1877. 1 
Resolving to explore South Babylonia, or Chaldsea, he selected 
Tello, the ancient Lagash, and worked at it till his death more 
than twenty years later. The finds were examined and described 
by Heuzey, Curator of Oriental Antiquities at the Louvre. Since 
Botta and Layard had revealed Assyria, no Asiatic discoveries 
approached in importance those at Tello. Texts had been found 
in the Nineveh library which Rawlinson pronounced to be 
pre-Semitic, and Loftus and Taylor had stumbled on similar 
inscriptions further south ; but for the purposes of history the 
Sumerians were discovered at Tello. The excavations of the 
American Pumpelly expedition in Turkestan suggest a possible 
origin of the race which had reached a lofty culture when they 
became visible, possessing a complicated language, a system of 
irrigation and a highly developed art. A magnificent collection of 
diorite statues suggests the glories of the reign of Gudea, about 
2700 B.C. The inscriptions told of trade with Arabia, the Sinaitic 
peninsula and the Mediterranean. When de Sarzec died in 1901 
he had written a new chapter of history. The palaces of Sargon 
and Sennacherib, at which Europe had marvelled in the middle 
of the century, appeared relatively modern beside the vast 
antiquity of Tello. The chain of human experience lengthened 
when it was realised that a large part of Babylonian culture, 
including the art of writing, was inherited by the Semites from 
the Sumerians. 

While de Sarzec was busy at Tello, an American expedition 
was sent to Nippur in 1886 under the lead of Peters and Hilprecht. 
Nowhere have so many inscriptions been recovered, thousands 
of tablets having formed part of the temple library. The long 

1 The explorations at Tello are best described by Hilprecht. Recent 
excavations are well summarised in King and Hall, Egypt and Western 
Asia in the Light of Recent Discoveries, 1907. 



THE ANCIENT EAST 511 

array of magnificent volumes in which the results are recorded CHAP. 
constitutes the most important addition to our knowledge of XXV 
Northern Babylonia. Still more recently German scholars 
have excavated Fara and are now engaged on Babylon itself, 
the ancient glories of which have been reconstructed in Koldewey's 
plans. Though no monuments have been brought to light in 
Babylonia approaching in impressiveness those discovered by 
Botta and Layard, the evidences of culture are far more numerous 
and important. Since the cylinder of the Flood no find has 
aroused such world-wide interest as that of the codeof Hammurabi, 
discovered by De Morgan l at Susa in 1901. The block of diorite, 
eight feet high, containing 282 paragraphs of laws, revealed in 
a flash a complex and refined civilisation. After expelling the 
Elamites about 2250, Hammurabi united, the North and the South 
into a single State and, desiring to enforce uniform laws, issued 
the code which bears his name. Beneath the relics of Persian, 
Parthian and Arab rule De Morgan also found a mass of inscrip- 
tions which reveal the early history of El am, hitherto vaguely 
known from Babylonian and Assyrian records. The spoils of 
Susa fill two halls of the Louvre. During the last decade the 
exploration of Assyria has been resumed. The unexhausted 
site of Nineveh has been once more attacked, and an examination 
of Shergat on the Tigris revealed the city of Assur, the first 
capital, which has been systematically investigated by the 
Gennan Oriental Society. We thus learn of Assyria before the 
days of its greatness, when it was still a province under 
Babylonian viceroys. 

Duncker gave to the world the first coherent account of the 
ancient East in his ' History of Antiquity.' The English 
equivalent was supplied by George Rawlinson, who received 
valuable help from his famous brother and George Smith. 
' The Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World ' 
dealt with the geography and history, religion and customs, arts 
and sciences of Chaldasa, Assyria, Babylonia, Media and Persia, 
and was followed by volumes on Parthia, the Sassanid or New 
Persian Empire, and Phoenicia. Rawlinson, like Duncker, was 
ignorant of Oriental languages ; but his survey was a scholarly 
performance, and its later volumes broke new ground. He 
devoted far more attention to culture than Duncker, and the 
illustrations formed a novel and welcome feature. The manual 
of Lenormant enjoyed immense popularity ; but its wide 
learning was discounted by its uncritical spirit. A more 

1 In addition to his great series of reports, see his brief summary, 
Histoire et Travaux de la Delegation en Perse, 1905. 



512 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, scholarly guide was Maspero, whose ' History of the Ancient 
XXV Peoples of the East ' first appeared in 1875. Twenty years later 
he covered the ground in far more detail in three sumptuous 
volumes. While he only writes with first-hand authority on 
Egypt, the work is a careful survey of the fortunes of the early 
empires. Finally Eduard Meyer, in his great ' History of 
Antiquity,' has described with the hand of a master the earliest 
civilisations of Babylonia. First published in 1884, the second 
edition, appearing in 1909, is less a revision than a new work — 
so great is the mass of material that has come to light in the 
interval. For the Empires of the Tigris and Euphrates, as for 
every other part of the Ancient East, the monumental ' History 
of Art ' by Perrot and Chipiez is an indispensable guide. Special 
histories are no less numerous. A brief but excellent summary 
was published by George Smith, and Hommel wrote the first 
detailed narrative for Oncken's ' Weltgeschichte.' The learning 
of the Munich Professor is generally recognised ; but his judg- 
ment inspires little confidence. A more trustworthy narrative 
was provided shortly after by Tiele. The discoveries of the last 
two decades have been utilised in Winckler's contribution to 
Helmolt's ' History of Mankind ' and in King's admirable 
history of Babylonian civilisation. 

We are now able to reconstruct tentatively and in outline 
the features of the lands watered by the Tigris and the Euphrates. 
Eduard Meyer's conviction that the Semites occupied the 
country before the Sumerians is not generally shared ; but it 
is not yet possible to determine when the rival races entered 
the region which bears the stamp of both. The country appears 
to have been for long divided among city-states — Kish, Lagash, 
Ur and others — whose fortunes and relations to one another 
were constantly changing. Sargon bulks largely as the ruler not 
only of Accad and Sumer but as the founder of an Empire 
stretching to the Mediterranean. His edifice was overthrown 
by the Elamites ; but when the wave receded, the city of Babylon 
became the centre of a brilliant and powerful Empire. Of the 
dynasties which succeeded one another we know most of the first, 
of which Hammurabi was the greatest figure. The great mass 
of official correspondence, judicial decisions and legal documents, 
in addition to the Code, throw an almost dazzling light on his 
reign, and reveal a startlingly modern civilisation. Of the history 
of Assyria, which gradually rose from vassalage to independence, 
the early chapters are as meagre as the later are detailed. If 
Winckler's verdict, ' a military robber-state,' be too severe, it 
was at any rate far less cultured than the venerable Empire 



THE ANCIENT EAST 513 

which it ultimately overthrew. It has been maintained that CHAP. 
Babylonia was to the ancient East what Rome has been to XXV 
Europe. In law and science, religion and art, its influence was 
incalculable. The Tel-el-Amarna letters reveal the unchallenged 
supremacy of its culture over vast areas ; yet there is no ground 
for declaring Babylonian civilisation older than or the parent 
of that of Egypt. While in Egypt religion is only one of many 
topics, in Babylonia it has attracted more attention than any 
other. The revelation of the debt of the Jews aroused not only 
interest but in some camps consternation. The legend of the 
Flood was only the first of the many borrowings which the 
inscriptions have revealed ; and though the measure of obligation 
is differently assessed no scholar denies the immense influence 
of the older on the younger religion. Babylonian ideas have 
been expounded from one standpoint by Sayce, from another by 
Jastrow, and from a third by Delitzsch, whose ' Babel and Bible ' 
struck the imagination of the world. A bold attempt has been 
made by Winckler and Jeremias to discover the key to Baby- 
lonian religion in astral theory which; they declare, spread over 
the whole of nearer Asia. Though the hypothesis was supported 
with great learning and ingenuity, it has been emphatically 
rejected by the majority of competent judges. 



Ill 

Among the most recent sensational episodes in the revelation 
of the Ancient East is the discovery of an advanced civilisation 
in Crete 1 in the second and third millennia before Christ. In 
Egypt and Babylonia the frontiers of knowledge were pushed 
further back ; in Crete, as in Mycenae, an unknown world was 
brought to light. Its romantic interest was intensified by the 
establishment of an historic foundation for one of the most 
famous legends of the ancient world. How the Minotaur, half 
man half bull, devoured the septennial tribute of youths and 
maidens from Athens in the labyrinth, how Theseus joined the 
victims, how Ariadne, daughter of Minos, falling in love with 
him, gave him a sword to slay the Minotaur and a thread to 
retrace his steps, was known to every Greek child and has thrilled 
the imagination of the centuries. The exploration of the city 
called by Homer ' Great Knossos ' was among the ambitions of 
Schliemann ; but the task was destined to be accomplished by 

1 In addition to the writings of Sir Arthur Evans, see the descriptive 
works of Ronald Burrows and Mr. and Mrs. Hawes. 



514 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, an Englishman. Noting stones at Athens with an unknown 
XXV script, Arthur Evans purchased part of the site of Knossos in 
1895 and the rest in 1900. He was equipped for his task by 
encyclopaedic knowledge of the history and geography of the 
lands of the Mediterranean. In his first season he unearthed a 
vast palace, larger than those of Tiryns and Mycenae, adorned 
with frescoes denoting a high stage of civilisation. The elaborate 
low-necked garments of the ladies were scarcely distinguishable 
from evening dress, and provoked a French savant to exclaim, 
' Why, they are Parisiennes.' A gaming board of superb design 
confirmed the impression that the culture was far richer than that 
of Mycenae. The frescoes of bull-grappling l and other evidences 
showed the prominent place in the life and thought of the people 
occupied by the bull. The ramifications of the lower parts 
of the palace were so extensive as to suggest that the labyrinth 
was within, not without the building. The nine weeks' work 
in 1900 opened up new vistas of incalculable importance for the 
early history of the Mediterranean ; and the explorations of the 
following years have fulfilled the promise of the dawn. Though 
the palace was pillaged and burned about the year 1400, enough 
is left both of the structure and its contents to reconstruct the 
life of the Minoan capital. The lack of defensive preparations 
and of warlike themes and frescoes shows that it felt secure from 
attack, in eloquent contrast to the massive walls of Tiryns and 
Mycenae and the military emblems of Egypt and Assyria. 

The pioneering work at Knossos has been supplemented in 
other parts of the island. Italian scholars have explored Phaestos, 
which boasts a fine palace, and Hagia Triada, a country edifice 
close by. Miss Boyd discovered a town at Gournia, which 
affords a glimpse of the life of the people ; and the British 
School at Athens has brought to light another town at Palaio- 
kastro. Though the inscriptions remain unintelligible it is now 
possible to outline the early history of Crete. The remains of 
archaic pottery suggest the existence of settlements some 
thousands of years earlier than the Minoan civilisation, which may 
be divided into the Early, Middle and Late epochs, each con- 
taining three divisions. The palace at Knossos was begun in 
the third period of Middle Minoan and finished during the first 
two divisions of Late Minoan. Its destruction followed swiftly 
on its completion. The simultaneous annihilation of Phaestos and 
Hagia Triada shows that the whole of Minoan culture was over- 
whelmed in a common ruin, perhaps by the Mycenaeans,themselves 
driven forth by the Achaeans. For a time artistic production 
1 Catching the horns of a charging bull and vaulting over it. 



THE ANCIENT EAST 515 

continued, but darkness descends with the coming of the Dorians. CHAP. 
That intercourse with Egypt was common during the Old and XXV 
Middle Kingdoms is proved by an ever-increasing mass of evidence 
in both countries ; but as Egyptian chronology only becomes 
certain with the eighteenth dynasty, the exact limits of the 
earlier stages of Minoan civilisation cannot be established. Sir 
Arthur Evans sides with the scholars who shorten Egyptian 
history, and dates Early Minoan about 3400. In any case the 
Cretan excavations reveal the history of at least two thousand 
years. Minoan civilisation was one of the sources of Greek 
culture, and among its contributions was the alphabet, the 
signs of which were merely simplified by the Phoenicians. If 
we are to seek for the pioneers of European civilisation, they 
may well be found in the first lords of the sea, the rulers of 
Minoan Crete. 

IV 

The latest civilisation to be revealed is that of the Hittites. 1 
The references in the Old Testament suggest a good deal of inter- 
course in the earliest days of Israel ; but more illumination has 
come from Egypt. We possess the Egyptian copy of a treaty 
between Rameses II and the King of the Kheta — the first 
recorded treaty in history ; and they are mentioned in the 
Tel-el-Amarna letters. Assyrian records, again, speak of the 
Khatti as a powerful people in Northern Syria about 1100, and 
at intervals till 717 when Sargon III relates that he put an 
end to their independence. A little additional evidence comes 
from the Van inscriptions in Armenia, which have been partially 
deciphered. From these sources it is clear that the Hittites 
were an important power in Northern Syria and Eastern Asia 
Minor for about a thousand years before they were swallowed 
up by Assyria, that they were at first military and aggressive, 
later commercial and wealthy, and that they had close political 
and commercial relations with neighbouring peoples. This 
evidence has been largely supplemented during recent years by a 
study of the sites. In 1812 Burckhardt noticed a basalt block at 
Hamah with a strange script, and Layard found some inscriptions 
in the ruins of Nineveh. The sculptures seen by George Smith 
at Jerablus on the Euphrates, supposed to be Carchemish; led 
to excavations by the British Museum, and the inscriptions were 
pronounced to be Hittite. A study of the rock-monuments at 

1 All previous works are superseded by Garstang, The Land of the 
Hittites, 1910, 

2 l 2 



516 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. Boghaz Keui and other rock-sculptures in different parts of Asia 
XXV Minor led Sayce to declare in 1880 that a great Hittite Empire 
had extended from the Taurus to the Mgean. In 1884 Wright 
published his ' Empire of the Hittites, ' the first work on the subject, 
which discussed the evidence of the Old Testament, Egypt and 
Assyria. Sayce 's work, which followed, was notable for its 
valiant efforts to decipher the inscriptions ; but Messerschmidt, 
the editor of the Hittite Corpus, declared that only one sign of 
the 200 that were known could be interpreted with certainty. 

Though the language remains unread, exploration and excava- 
tion have made rapid progress. Sir William Ramsay and Miss 
Bell have detected Hittite remains all over central Asia Minor. 
By far the most important work has been done at Boghaz Keui 
in North Cappadocia, the systematic exploration of which was 
begun in 1906 by a joint expedition of the Berlin Archaeological 
and the Nearer Asia Societies under the guidance of Winckler. 
The numerous inscriptions in Hittite and Babylonian cuneiform 
found in the ruins of the palace should supply the eagerly awaited 
key to many problems. Of considerable importance is Sakje- 
Geuzi, in North Syria, recently excavated by Garstang. In 191 1 
the British Museum began the excavation of Carchemish on the 
Euphrates, the capital of the North Syrian section of the Empire. 
Sinjerli and Tell-Halaf have been examined by a German expedi- 
tion. All these North Syrian sites exhibit a powerful Assyrian 
influence. A few years ago Jensen declared that there was no 
evidence of a great Hittite Empire and that the inscriptions 
were the work of local princes. The volume of testimony is now 
so great that such scepticism is rapidly disappearing. The 
pictures of Kheta warriors in Egypt closely resemble those of 
the Hittite sculptures. The history has been tentatively 
sketched by Garstang, whose theory of two periods of Hittite 
power, the former connected with Boghaz Keui, the latter at 
Carchemish, has been generally accepted. 

The recovery of the Hittite and Minoan Empires has not only 
lit up some dark pages of history, but is of assistance in tracing 
the westward march of Oriental influences. Till recently 
excavations in Asia Minor were mainly confined to Hellenistic 
and Greco-Roman sites ; and Troy, which was explored to the 
bottom, was too remote to throw much light on the general history 
of the peninsula. In these circumstances it was natural to 
suppose that Greece owed to the Phoenicians the major part of 
what they learned from the East. But the fame of the men of 
Tyre and Sidon has been sadly dimmed since the days of Movers. 
Sir Arthur Evans showed that the Cretan script was independent 



THE ANCIENT EAST 517 

of and indeed earlier than Phoenician, and every addition to the CHAP, 
remains of Phoenician art has confirmed the impression of its xxv 
mediocrity. Nobody now shares Perrot's belief that Cyprus 
was a mere artistic dependency of Phoenicia. We possess no 
Phoenician monument or coin before the ninth century and no 
writing till later, though the Old Testament and Homer show 
that they possessed civilisation earlier. Their commercial 
activity is not in doubt ; but they were not the only nor the 
principal purveyors of the culture of the East. The discovery 
of a Hittite Empire brings meaning and order into the history 
of Asia Minor, and explains the permeation of Oriental influences. 1 
Out of its ruins arose the power of Phrygia and Lydia. The 
former vividly impressed the Greek imagination and has left 
imposing remains, which have been unaccountably neglected. 
The latter was the last link between Greece and the East. The 
excavation of Sardes, commenced by Americans in 1910, will 
throw light on many dark places. Hogarth's exploration of the 
deeper strata of the shrine of Artemis at Ephesus, which Wood 
left untouched, has revealed a wealth of Oriental influence. While 
the culture of the East reached Greece to some extent through 
the Minoans and the Phoenicians, there can be little doubt 
that the main pathway was by land, not by sea, and that the 
route ran through the wide dominions of the Hittite Empire. 



Few parts of the world have guarded their secrets so jealously 
as Arabia, perhaps the cradle of the Semitic race. The interior 
is still unvisited, nature and man combining to warn off intruders 
at peril of their lives. Carsten Niebuhr and Burckhardt, Burton 
and Pal grave, Doughty and Bent, have lifted corners of the veil. 
It was not till the last three decades of the nineteenth century 
that Halevy and Glaser revealed the outlines of early Arabian 
civilisation in the south. 2 In the course of several journeys 
they explored the country round Sana, and collected hundreds 
of inscriptions which have been published in the Corpus of 
Semitic Inscriptions. Glaser's sketch of the ' History and 
Geography of Arabia before Mohammed,' published in 1890, 
laid the foundation on which subsequent scholars have built. 
The fragmentary knowledge derived from the references of Jewish 

1 See Hogarth's admirable lectures, Ionia and the East, 1909. 

2 See Otto Weber, Glaser's Forschungsreisen in Siidarabien, 1909, and 
Hogarth, The Penetration of Arabia, 1904. 



518 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, and classical writers was slightly enlarged from Assyrian sources ; 

XXV but it was the Arabian inscriptions which revealed a great 
civilisation for a thousand years before Christ. Most of them 
are votive, and the few that are historical are undated ; yet it is 
possible to outline a few results. Four civilised kingdoms can 
be traced, two of which, the Sabsean and the Minaean, are known 
in some detail. In the former, the Sheba of the Old Testament, 
the inscriptions go back to about 800, indicate the periods, 
rulers and capitals, and reveal their mythology and religion. 
The Minaean Kingdom is less known. 

The first important step in the recovery of ancient Persia 1 was 
taken in 1754 when Anquetil Du Perron, at the age of twenty, 
set forth for India to obtain the sacred books of Zoroastrianism. 
Enlisting as a private under the French East India Company 
he reached Surat, the goal of his journey, after four years of war 
and illness. He spent three years among the Parsis, learning 
Zend and Pehlvi, and studying their religious practices. In 
1762 he returned to Paris with his manuscripts, and in 1771 
appeared his translation of the Zend Avesta with an account 
of the customs and rites of the Parsis. The work was denounced 
in some quarters as a modern forgery, in others as a fantastic 
absurdity ; and the significance of one of the most heroic feats 
in the history of scholarship was rarely recognised. For half 
a century the discovery appeared to remain sterile, till the second 
founder of Zend studies appeared. Burnouf was above all a 
Sanskritist ; but his researches into the languages and civilisa- 
tion of India led him to study Zend, which he took to be 
the language of ancient Persia. But he quickly found that 
Anquetil's translation was of little assistance, since he had learned 
from men who fully understood neither Zend nor Pehlvi, into 
which the sacred books had been translated in the Middle Ages. 
It was Burnouf 's achievement to render himself independent 
of the degenerate scholarship of the modern Parsis by means 
of a Sanskrit translation of one of the sacred books. His ' Com- 
mentary on the Yasna ' established the real character both of the 
language and religion of ancient Persia. Believing that the 
language of the Persian Kings could not differ materially from 
that of the sacred books, he turned his attention to the cuneiform 
inscriptions of Persepolis and carried their interpretation far 
beyond the point at which Grotefend had left it. His death 
was an irreparable loss to Persian studies ; which were hence- 
forward pursued rather by German than French scholars. It 

1 See Darmesteter, ' L'Orientalisme en France,' ch. i., Essais Orientaux, 
188*. 



THE ANCIENT EAST 519 

was on his foundations that Gutschmid and Noldeke built their CHAP, 
reconstruction of Persian history. XXV 

The study of ancient India 1 was rendered possible by the 
linguistic researches of Sir William Jones, Colebrooke and Bopp. 
In studying Sanskrit Jones was quickly struck by its resemblance 
to Latin and Greek. Spending the closing years of his life in 
India as a judge, he founded the Bengal Asiatic Society, trans- 
lated specimens of Sanskrit literature and wrote on many aspects 
of ancient India. Though his scholarship was not profound, 
his enthusiasm aroused widespread interest. His work was 
continued by Colebrooke, the first great Sanskrit scholar of 
Europe, who spent most of his life as an Indian judge. Learning 
Sanskrit in order to read the Hindu lawbooks, he published an 
essay on the Vedas in 1805 which gave the first authentic account 
of them, and compiled a Sanskrit grammar. His exact trans- 
lations and analyses came as a wholesome corrective to the 
fantastic speculations of amateurs. If the first step towards 
the revelation of ancient India was taken by English scholars, 
the second was due to Germans. In his brilliant essay on 
the ' Language and Wisdom of the Indians ' Friedrich Schlegel 
showed the close connection of Sanskrit with other tongues ; but 
it was the work of Bopp to prove it in detail. In reading the 
Mahabharata and Ulfilas he was amazed at the close resemblance 
of Sanskrit to Gothic. He planned a comparative grammar of 
' Sanskrit and its daughters,' and in 1816 published his brief 
but pregnant ' System of Conjugation,' which established the 
relations of Sanskrit with Latin, Greek and Persian. He followed 
up his success by a Sanskrit grammar and devoted his later years 
to his greatest work, the ' Comparative Grammar.' By the 
unwearying labours of Bopp the Indo-European languages were 
brought into relation with one another, and a searchlight was 
thrown upon vast spaces of unrecorded experience. 

Sanskrit being once thoroughly understood, it. was not long 
before attempts were made to reconstruct the civilisation of 
ancient India. The first comprehensive survey was undertaken 
by Lassen, 2 a Norwegian trained at Bonn, who published his 
encyclopaedic survey of Indian Antiquities between 1847 an d 
1862. His work deals with geography and natural conditions, 
history to the foundation of the European settlements, literature 

1 See Benfey, Geschichte der orientalischen Philologie, 1869; Darmesteter, 
' L'Orientalisme en France,' ch. ii. ; Max Miiller's essay on Colebrooke, in 
Chips from a German Workshop, vol. ii. ; Lefmann, Franz Bopp, 2 vols., 
1891-7. 

- See Allg. Deutsche Biog. 



520 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, and art, religion and customs. Though the field was too vast 
XXV f or every part to be authoritative, Lassen's massive volumes 
gave an immense impetus to study, and his successors have 
stood on his shoulders. In the reconstruction of ancient India no 
chapter is more important than that of the discovery of Buddhist 
scriptures by Brian Hodgson. 1 He relates that on arriving 
as Assistant Resident in Nepal in 1821 he persuaded a pundit 
to procure copies of the chief manuscripts in the monasteries. 
Writing without having seen a line of any Continental scholar 
on Buddhism his conclusions were not always correct ; but his 
fame as the founder of the study of Buddhism on the basis of 
the texts is secure. He divided his treasures among six libraries, 
giving each enough for a comprehensive study of Buddhism. 
One of the largest shares fell to Paris, where they attracted the 
attention of Burnouf ; and it was on them that he based his 
epoch-making ' Introduction to the Study of Indian Buddhism.' 
The investigation of the most attractive of Asiatic religions 
has been eagerly pursued. The attempt of Senart and one or 
two other scholars to destroy the historic personality of the 
founder has failed, and the assured results of half a century of 
research were summarised by Oldenberg. Max Muller's superb 
collection of Sacred Books of the East has rendered a priceless 
service to students of the religious history of the world. 

1 See Sir William Hunter's admirable biography, 1896. 



CHAPTER XXVI 

THE JEWS AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 



The recovery of the civilisations of the early East has run CHAP, 
parallel with the application of critical methods to the Jewish XXVI 
Scriptures. 1 As Niebuhr's main conclusions were anticipated 
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, several results of 
Old Testament scholarship were foreseen by isolated thinkers 
of an earlier time. Hobbes denied the Mosaic origin of the 
Pentateuch, and Spinoza noticed its composite character. Pere 
Simon provoked the wrath of Bossuet by suggesting that the 
Old Testament should be criticised like other books. A long 
step forward was taken when Astruc separated the Elohim and 
Jehovah strains of the Pentateuch. But the era of systematic 
criticism opens with Eichhorn, who caught the spirit of historical 
research with which Gottingen was permeated. He learned to 
regard the books of the Old Testament as possessing a definitely 
Oriental character and requiring interpretation in the light of 
Semitic ideas. Thus he established the first essential condition 
of the critical study of the Jews by terminating their isolation. 
The attempt to substitute a less mechanical conception of the 
sacred writings was simultaneously made by Herder, who described 
the Old Testament as a mirror of the folk-soul of Israel. Bound 
by close friendship, Eichhorn and Herder independently reached 
broadly similar results. Many years later Goethe looked back 
with gratitude to the two men who had opened up a new source 
of delight in the literature of the Jews. Eichhorn's ' Introduction 
to the Old Testament,' published in 1783, was the first compre- 
hensive attempt to apply critical methods to the sacred books. 
He had worked, he declared, in an unknown field. He only 
knew of Astruc's discovery at second hand, and testified that he 
had reached the same goal independently. He classified the 
1 See Cheyne's Founders of Old Testament Criticism, 1893. 



522 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, component parts of the Pentateuch according as they belonged 
XXVI to the Jehovistic or Elohistic version, and pointed out that many 
of the books of the Old Testament had passed through several 
hands. 

If Eichhorn was the founder of Old Testament criticism, 
Ewald 1 was the first critical historian of the Jews. ' What 
Wolf and Niebuhr have done for Greece and Rome,' wrote Arnold 
to Bunsen in 1835, ' seems sadly wanted for Judaea.' Milman's 
' History of the Jews,' written in 1829, was useful m insisting 
that the Bible should be studied like any other historical book, 
and the Jews as a member of the Semitic family ; but though 
described by Stanley as the first decisive inroad of German 
theology into England, the treatment was too brief and the 
author's knowledge too slight to meet the need of serious 
students. Born at Gottingen, where he was to pass most of his 
life, Ewald embarked on the study of Oriental languages while 
still at school, and sat at the feet of Eichhorn. Equally interested 
in philology, theology and history, he succeeded to his master's 
chair in 1827. He lectured on Sanskrit, Persian and Turkish, 
as well as on Semitic languages, and won his first triumph by 
a Hebrew Grammar. His commentaries on the Psalms, Job, 
Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, which he described collectively as the 
Poetical Books, showed that his religious insight was worthy of 
his philological equipment ; and he penetrated deeper into the 
meaning of the Prophets than any of his predecessors. 

As a young man Ewald formed the design of a ' History of the 
People of Israel ' ; and after the completion of the Prophets 
he set himself to gather up the results that had been obtained 
by half a century of scholarship. The work began to appear in 
1843, and the author lived to issue a third edition in 1864^8. In 
a long Introduction he declared that the gaps in the historical 
books could be filled by the poetic and prophetic writings, which 
best conveyed the feelings of the age. The first volume reaches 
to the death of Moses, and treats the early history as mythical, 
not fictitious. He describes Abraham as a representative man, 
and explains the quarrel of Jacob and Esau as the conflict 
between Hebrew and Arabian tribes. Moses is clearly historical 
and is the greatest founder of a religion after Christ. The passage 
of the Red Sea is historical, though not miraculous. Of the 
Israelites themselves the historian gives an eloquent but over- 
coloured picture. They discerned God and dared the uttermost 

1 The most authoritative study is by Wellhausen, in Festschrift zur 
Feiev d. i^ojdhrigen Bestehens der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu 
Gottingen, 1901. 



THE JEWS AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 523 

under His guidance. The Law of Moses first proclaimed a CHAP. 
God who delivers those who seek Him in spirit, obedience and XXVI 
faith. In this ' glorious primeval age ' the belief in Jehovah gave 
strength in battle and stimulated every aspect of life. Before 
Moses religion was individual ; with him it became national as 
well. Ewald's treatment of early history was stimulating but 
arbitrary. Like Niebuhr, he was often praised for his faculty of 
divination when he was merely giving rein to his imagination. 
On reaching the Kings he is on firmer ground. His portraits 
of Saul, David and Solomon are painted with extraordinary 
vigour. He makes a hero of David and idealises his people, 
whom he affirms to be as yet uncorrupted. His picture of Elijah 
is ablaze with colour. The narrative of the later centuries is 
far less impressive than that of the heroic age. 

To read Ewald is to measure the enormous distance that 
separates the middle from the end of the nineteenth century. 
In the first place, his narrative is drawn almost exclusively from 
the Old Testament itself. In narrating the conquest of Samaria 
in his revision of 1865 he declares Assyrian too little understood 
to be available for the purposes of an historian. Neither the 
revelation of ancient civilisations nor the nascent science of 
comparative religion are mirrored in his work. Secondly, the 
Jews are throughout the Chosen People, who, though not free 
from grave faults, are in the early centuries at any rate worthy 
of the privileged position they held. Their leading figures are 
too much idealised. Finally, he has no suspicion of the late origin 
of the law. Wellhausen indeed, though admitting his undeniable 
historical sense, places the ' History ' below the philological works. 
' I cannot admit that he opened the gate or pointed the way, 
like De Wette or Vatke. He was rather the great holder-up 
(der grosse Auj 'halter), who by his authority prevented the true 
interpretation of Jewish history being accepted.' With still 
more severity Pfleiderer has pronounced the book a didactic 
romance, and convicts the author of retarding biblical criticism by 
a generation. Despite these faults of commission and omission 
his volumes occupy a prominent place in historiography. 
His Semitic scholarship was beyond cavil. His contagious 
enthusiasm for his theme gave his work vitality and a personal 
note. No one could read him without feeling that the history of 
the Jews was equal in dramatic interest to that of Greece and 
Rome. The book found a warm welcome in England, and aroused 
interest far beyond the narrow limits of professional theologians. 
Stanley pronounced it a noble work, building on it his own 
'Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church,' which utilised 



524 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, the author's knowledge of the Holy Land, but contained little 
XXVI that was original and nothing that was profound. 

The great revolution in our conception of the Old Testament 
which is associated with the name of Wellhausen, and which 
rendered Ewald out of date; was prepared by the labours of 
several scholars. De Wette, in Wellhausen's words, ' the epoch- 
making pioneer of historical criticism in this field,' was the first 
to notice that the Mosaic law was unknown to Judges, Kings 
and Prophets alike, and to contend that Deuteronomy was little, 
if at all, older than King Josiah ; but the bold hypotheses of his 
earlier works were toned down in his later years, and the solution 
of the problem was reserved for a younger scholar. Vatke's 
' Biblical Theology,' published in 1835, contended that the 
religion of Israel was subject to the law of development. 1 But 
it was less the Hegelian philosophy of the work than his discovery 
of the real sequence of the sacred books which gives it its out- 
standing importance. Yet the assertion of the late origin of the 
priestly code was buried in a large and difficult volume, which 
few read and still fewer understood. His greatest achieve- 
ment is to have led Wellhausen to write, ' I have learned most 
and best from Vatke.' While Vatke was propounding new and 
revolutionary ideas at Berlin, similar conclusions had been 
reached by Reuss 3 at Strassburg. It flashed upon him that the 
Prophets were earlier than the Law, and the Psalms later than 
both. In seeking a clue to the religious development of the 
Jews he was confronted by the alleged existence of the complete 
Levitical system in the earliest stage of Jewish history, coupled 
with the absence of any knowledge of it in the Prophets. His 
conclusions were formulated in 1833 in twelve theses, which were 
so novel that he dared not publish them; and which were worked 
up half a century later in his ' History of the Old Testament 
Scriptures.' He found Vatke's book so forbidding in appearance 
that he did not read it, and it was not till his ideas were developed 
by his own pupils that he returned to the problems of his youth. 
Among his hearers was Graf, whose ' Historical Books of the Old 
Testament,' published in 1866, grew out of the germ planted in his 
mind a generation earlier. The Grafian hypothesis, as it came 
to be called, was unreservedly adopted in Duhm's classical work 
on the Prophets, which placed them at the centre of the religious 
development of the Jews. But other powerful voices had to be 
raised before traditional misconceptions could be overthrown. 

1 See Benecke's instructive biography, Wilhelm Vatke, 1883. 

2 Reuss' Bviefwechsel mit Graf, 1904, is of interest for the development 
of Old Testament studies. 



THE JEWS AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 525 

The first decisive step beyond Evvald in the interpretation CHAP, 
of Jewish history was taken by Kuenen. 1 His studies of the XXVI 
Old Testament won him the reputation of a consummate scholar ; 
and his ' Religion of Israel,' published in 1869, adopted the Grafian 
hypothesis. Though lacking the eloquence of Ewald, the 
Leyden Professor inspires far more confidence. His attitude is 
purely objective, while Ewald wrote as an apologist. His 
standpoint, he declared, denied the exceptional origin and the 
unique character of the Jewish religion. He rejects the miracles 
of the Old Testament, and declares the representation of early 
history in the Pentateuch and Joshua mainly legendary. No 
firm ground could be reached till about 800, when contemporary 
materials began. A history of the religious ideas of the Jews, 
he declared, had been rendered possible by the new chronological 
arrangement of the books of the Old Testament. Beginning 
with a sketch of religion in the eighth century, he glances back 
at the origins. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob may have existed. 
Moses certainly did exist. The Exodus probably took place 
about 1300. He turns tradition upside down by affirming that 
polytheism was not an innovation but the creed of the majority 
till the Exile. The priestly legislation, drawn up and written 
down after the Exile, had arisen at various times and been more 
than once worked up before reaching its final form. The third 
volume is devoted to a survey of Judaism, and the narrative 
ends with the fall of Jerusalem. The ' Religion of Israel ' leaves 
an impression of far greater originality than Ewald, whose 
volumes are little more than an eloquent paraphrase of the Old 
Testament. Kuenen's work, with its long appendices and 
notes, is rather a string of dissertations than a narrative ; but 
his abiding merit is to have interpreted the successive stages 
of the religion of Israel. A profound and fearless scholar, he 
stands beside Ewald and WeUhausen, and is not the least of 
the three. 

With the publication of Wellhausen's ' History of Israel ' in 
1878, following close upon his analysis of the Hexateuch, the 
hypothesis which Vatke, Graf and Kuenen had expounded in 
their books, and Reuss and Lagarde in their lectures, ceased to 
be the possession of isolated scholars and became the property 
of the world. 2 As a student, he declared, he had felt that the 
Law and the Prophets were two different worlds, and he 

1 See Reville, Abraham Kuenen, 1890. 

2 Wellhausen's results are well summarised in Pfleiderer, Development 
of Theology since Kant, 1890. Cp. Robertson Smith's review in Lectures 
and Essays, 1912. 



526 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, welcomed the Grafian hypothesis on its appearance. In Judges, 
XXVI Kings and Prophets there was no sign of the Law, whereas after 
the Exile it at once became prominent. These facts, calmly 
considered, told their own tale. The Mosaic law was not the 
starting-point of the history of ancient Israel, but of Judaism. 
Deuteronomy was found in the Temple under Josiah. The 
Levitical law was not written till after the fall of the Kingdom 
of Judah, and the Pentateuch was not accepted as authoritative 
till Ezra. It thus became possible to estimate the originality 
and significance of the Prophets. The book aroused the greatest 
excitement among historians and theologians all over the world. 
The work was never continued, and reappeared in later editions 
under the more suitable title of ' Prolegomena to the History of 
Israel.' But he contributed a brief ' History of Israel and Judah ' 
to the ninth edition of the ' Encyclopaedia Britannica,' and in 
1894 published a fuller narrative. His later years have been 
largely devoted to early Arabian civilisation and the Gospels. 

Wellhausen's book divided Old Testament scholars all over 
the world into two camps ; but most competent scholars 
have enlisted under his banner. It was generally recognised 
that his reconstruction alone rendered the religious development 
of the Jews intelligible. Three years later Stade began to publish 
a history of Israel based on its conclusions. The tone of the 
work is highly critical, indeed almost polemical. ' Our science 
lags behind other historical sciences because it has been almost 
monopolised by theologians.' To advance it needed the aid of 
philologists, historians and students of comparative religion. 
In his pages there is but little left of the traditional story of 
early Israel. He finds no evidence for the sojourn in Egypt, 
and declares the narratives of the conquest of Canaan mere 
sagas. With David we reach solid ground ; but we must be on 
our guard against the colossal exaggerations of the chroniclers. 
The realm of David and Solomon was small, its culture primitive, 
the splendours of court and temple a myth. David was not a 
' Catholic King ' nor an evangelical Christian, but a typical 
ruler of one of the many little principalities into which Syria was 
then divided. The discovery of King Mesa's inscription reveals 
Moab with its tribal god and its identical order of ideas. There 
was no monotheism before the Prophets, and ancestor-worship 
and belief in spirits were general. The practical difference 
between Elohim and Jehovah was small. Adopting Wellhausen's 
results, Stade finds no trace of the Mosaic law before King Josiah. 
The exile in Babylon he believes to have been in no way painful 
except in the diminished opportunity for religious devotion. No 



THE JEWS AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 527 

reader can fail to be impressed by the power and erudition of CHAP, 
the first critical history of the Jews ; but the undertone of con- XXVI 
troversy and the constant emphasis on the falsity of tradition 
interfere with its enjoyment. 

The chief exponent of Wellhausen's views in England was 
his friend Robertson Smith. 1 Having learned the secrets of 
Semitic philology from Lagarde at Gottingen, he was appointed 
at the age of twenty-four to a professorship of Oriental languages 
and the Old Testament at the Free Church College at Aberdeen 
in 1870. In 1875 he contributed an article on the Bible to the 
ninth edition of the ' Encyclopaedia Britannica ' which led to a 
charge of heresy. The prolonged trial aroused as much interest 
as that of Colenso. The Professor was finally acquitted of 
heresy, but deprived of his chair. Confident in his critical 
principles Smith delivered lectures to large audiences in Edin- 
burgh and Glasgow, which were published under the title of 
•' The Old Testament in the Jewish Church,' and ' The Prophets 
of Israel.' Though popular in treatment they rested on profound 
study, combining an exhaustive knowledge of Continental 
scholarship with original views. His appointment to the Arabic 
chair at Cambridge was followed by his ' Kinship and Marriage 
in Early Arabia ' and his ' Lectures on the Religion of the 
Semites,' a systematic comparison of Hebrew religion with the 
beliefs and practices of other branches of the Semitic family. 
He pointed out that beliefs varied and were difficult to date, and 
that only religious observances were primitive and fixed. His 
investigations led him to reject the notion of fundamental 
differences between Semites and Aryans. These volumes, 
containing his most original work, are full of profound research 
and brilliant analysis. Though naturally less popular than 
his early lectures, they revealed the existence in England of 
a Semitic scholar equal in learning and insight to the greatest 
names in Holland and Germany. His early death was an 
irreparable loss to the critical study of the Old Testament and 
to the nascent science of comparative religion. 

The critical treatment of Jewish history on the lines of 
Wellhausen was inaugurated in France by Renan.' His work 
on the ' Origins of Christianity ' completed, he returned to the 
field in which he had won his fame. He had written a brilliant 

1 See the detailed biography by Black and Chrystal, 1912. Cp. Burkitt, 
Eng. Hist. Review, Oct. 1894. 

2 The best books on Renan are by Grant Duff, 1893 ; Seailles, 1895 ; 
Mme. Darmesteter, 1897. Darmesteter, Notice sur la Vie et I'CEuvre de 
Renan, 1893, gives an authoritative verdict on the scholar. 



528 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, history of Semitic languages, had visited the scenes of Jewish 
XXVI history, and had persuaded the Academy of Inscriptions to 
undertake a Corpus of Semitic Inscriptions. ' To have been 
consistent,' he declared, ' I should have commenced my " Origins 
of Christianity " with the volume I publish to-day, for they go 
back to the great prophets who introduced morality into religion.' 
He adds that he chose the most urgent part of his task first owing 
to the uncertainty of life. But at sixty he found himself still 
in good health, plunged boldly into his task, and lived to com- 
plete the most fascinating history of the Jewish people ever 
written. 

The first volume extends to David, and embraces the legend- 
ary history of the Israelites. He is convinced that tradition 
contains precious elements, if not of fact, at least of atmosphere. 
In traversing this twilight world the historian needs imagination. 
' Even if I have guessed wrongly on some points, I am certain 
that I have grasped the unique work which the breath of God, 
that is the soul of the world, has realised through Israel/ He 
warns his readers that he is providing less a history than a half 
imaginative reconstruction of society and religion before the 
historical period. The outlines can be traced — the life in 
Babylonia, the sojourn in Egypt, the exodus under Moses or 
some other leader ; but before David there are no certain facts. 
It is useless to ask what happened ; we can only picture various 
ways in which things may have happened. Every sentence 
should include a ' perhaps.' A gulf yawns between Renan and 
other leading scholars. Kuenen declared that in omitting an 
analysis of the sources he was setting sail without a chart, and 
complained that he accepted and rejected material with equal 
caprice. Wellhausen condemned the volume as unworthy of 
his reputation. Robertson Smith pronounced his reconstruc- 
tion of the patriarchal age altogether wrong. The patriarchs, 
declared Smith, were quite different from nomads, and resembled 
the great householders of the time of the Kings. Equally 
baseless was his conviction of the monotheistic tendency of 
the Semites ; for it was only in Israel, and then only owing to 
the Prophets, that monotheism developed. He exaggerated the 
difference between Jahveh and Elohim, and the latter was a 
creature of his fancy. He idealised the early Israelites and 
believed that they degenerated, whereas their religious ideas were 
clarified and purified by time. Thus the first volume, despite 
its compelling interest, is the weakest of the five. 1 

1 For specialist criticisms see Robertson Smith, Lectures and Essays, 
1912, and Kuenen, ' Drei Wege, Ein Ziel,' in Abhandlungen, 1894. 



THE JEWS AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 529 

With David, the founder of Jerusalem and the dynasty, the CHAP, 
historical period is declared to begin ; but the portrait is as XXVI 
darkly shadowed as that of Ewald erred by excess of colour. 
The King makes no appeal to the historian, who believes his 
power to have been magnified by tradition and points out that 
he can no longer claim credit for the Psalms. He is compared 
to one of the kinglets of Abyssinia or to Abd-el-Kader, the warrior 
chief of Algeria, a ruthless potentate surrounded by his harem 
and supported by mercenaries, lacking religious and moral 
ideas. Solomon was a miniature Louis XIV, more intelligent 
than his father, but a thorough epicurean. Of the divided 
Kingdom Renan gives a sombre picture. The times were rude, 
the Kings were cruel, and Jahveh encouraged every abomination. 
Of Elijah, whom he pronounces in large measure a legendary 
figure, he writes with something like detestation for his savage 
intolerance. Ahab appears as a tolerant and enlightened ruler. 
By far the most important event of the time was the reduction 
to writing of the legends of the patriarchs and the wars, followed 
by the independent Jahvist and Elohistic compositions which 
were long after worked up into the Pentateuch. 

The picture of the Prophets has been universally criticised. 
Renan often declares that the Jews stand for religion as the Greeks 
for intellect ; but though admitting that Israel owes them its 
historic importance, he finds as much to blame as to praise. 
Amos is sombre and narrow, passionately threatening the day 
of wrath, urging men to rend their hearts, not their garments. 
Hosea is like a preacher of the Ligue or a Puritan pamphleteer. 
Isaiah's reputation is largely due to his supposed authorship of 
the writings of the far greater genius who lived during the Exile. 
The prophet was the conscience of his people ; but he was a 
publicist not less than a preacher, a politician not less than 
a theologian, a forerunner of Calvin, Knox and Cromwell. He 
cannot conceal his contempt for the apocalyptic thunder and 
the shrill intolerance of Jeremiah, whom he compares to a 
journalist of the type of Felix Pyat crossed with an implacable 
Jesuit, and whom he pillories as one of the founders of 
religious persecution and an enemy of the Monarchy and the 
State. Ezekiel suggested the ' Chatiments ' of Victor Hugo 
and the social visions of Fourier. Exclusive preoccupation with 
moral standards does not tend either to culture or to national 
strength, and the Prophets hastened the doom of a people who 
had in any case no talent for politics. Yet they possess undying 
importance. They transmuted a tribal God into the righteous 
Lord of the universe. They pleaded the cause of the poor and 



530 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, humble. They were the founders of the religion of humanity, 
XXVI the forerunners of Jesus. Early Israel possessed no real religion. 
The Elohim were the spirits of the air, Yahweh the capricious 
despot of a tiny world, who exacted sacrifice but not a pure and 
contrite heart. It was the Prophets who turned dross into gold 
and evolved the idea of ethical monotheism. No one has written 
with greater enthusiasm of the Second Isaiah, the last and 
greatest of the Prophets. ' With him we are on the top of a 
mountain whence we discern Jesus on the summit of another 
mountain, with a deep depression between.' 

The transformation of a secular State into a theocracy, which 
had begun before the Captivity, is traced in detail, but without 
sympathy. Renan sharply castigates the futility of the Priestly 
Code and the sterile scholasticism of its commentators. Nehemiah 
is described as the first Jesuit, who turned Jerusalem into a 
tomb. The Law was the most terrible instrument of torture 
ever invented, an unpardonable departure from the tradition of 
the Prophets, whose work was only resumed by Christ. The 
spirit was slain by the letter. The chapters on Judaism, though 
containing a good deal of sound criticism, are far too polemical. 
He admires the heroism of Judas Maccabaeus, but dwells with 
most pleasure on the emancipating influence of Hellenism, the 
cultured scepticism of the Sadducees and Ecclesiastes, the large- 
hearted charity of Hillel and Philo. The richly-coloured studies 
of culture and literature, of society and thought, of the ideals 
and superstitions which made up the atmosphere of the Hellen- 
istic era, show that the hand of the historian, though old and 
weary, had not lost its cunning. He had fulfilled the ambition 
of his life, for his two great works form an organic v/hole. ' All 
that the Frenchman of ordinary culture knows of the ancient 
East,' declares Brunetiere with truth, ' of comparative religion, 
of exegesis, comes directly or indirectly from Renan.' His 
achievement is to have aroused interest. It is the task of more 
exact scholars to continue and correct his work. 

Wellhausen's reconstruction was adopted in its main outlines 
by the majority of competent scholars all over the world ; but its 
acceptance was by no means unanimous or unconditional. The 
elder Delitzsch lamented that if Wellhausen was right, it would 
no longer be possible to speak of ' the Law and the Prophets.' 
Hommel accepted him for a time and subsequently reverted 
to the traditional view. Immediately after the appearance of 
Stade's iconoclastic volumes, Kittel came forward with a rival 
interpretation of Jewish history till the Captivity. Though 
dismissed by Robertson Smith as a dilution of Wellhausen, and 



THE JEWS AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 531 

though certain concessions are made to the critical school, the CHAP, 
book belongs to the conservative camp of Dillmann. He XXVI 
believes in Abraham and Joseph. He regards the Decalogue as 
Mosaic, and finds fragments of genuine tradition in the historical 
books which other scholars dismiss as accretions. The work is 
a curious compromise between the traditional and the critical 
schools, and the attribution of the main part of the Priestly Code 
to the reign of Hezekiah tangles the threads of development. 
Its chief merit is the detailed analysis of the sources. Other 
critics of Wellhausen, while accepting his view as to the late 
redaction of the Law, believe that parts of it are far older, in 
substance if not in form, than he allows. The Jewish view of 
Jewish history in the light of modern research has been presented 
with admirable skill and restraint in the Hibbert Lectures of 
Montefiore. 

In addition to general histories, innumerable monographs 
add stone after stone to the edifice. Admirable surveys of the 
literature of the Old Testament have been given by Reuss, 
Cornill and Driver. George Adam Smith has written the history 
of Jerusalem. Gunkel has studied the sources and character of 
Hebrew cosmology. Eduard Meyer has analysed the legends 
of the Patriarchs and reviewed the neighbours of early Israel. 
Duhm has devoted his life to the Prophets. The post-exilic era 
has attracted increasing attention. A temporary sensation was 
caused when Rosters, a Dutch theologian, asserted that the return 
from captivity under Cyrus was a myth, and that the Temple 
was built by those who had remained behind. The contention 
was decisively rebutted by Eduard Meyer, whose ' Origin of Juda- 
ism ' established the authenticity of the Persian documents in 
Ezra. Cheyne has painted one of the best pictures of religious 
life after the Exile. Schurer's monumental • History of the Jewish 
People in the Time of Christ ' presents a panoramic survey of the 
politics, religion and philosophy, the literature and society of 
three centuries, utilising to the full the new evidence of inscrip- 
tions, papyri and coins. The curious speculative developments 
of the later Judaism have been sketched with a master-hand 
by Bousset. 

The history of the Jews has benefited less by archaeological 
research than that of Egypt or Assyria. 1 No splendid buildings 
or sculpture have been brought to light, and the inscriptions are 
few. The first systematic explorations of the country were made 

1 See Pere Vincent, Canaan d'apres I' Exploration recente, 1907 ; Driver, 
Schweich Lectures, 1909 ; Bliss, The Development of Palestine Exploration, 
1906 

2 M 2 



532 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, by Edward Robinson, an American theologian, who published 
XXVI the record of his journey in 1838, and by Tobler, whose seven 
volumes of historical topography correspond to Leake's survey 
of Greece. The foundation of the Palestine Exploration Fund 
in 1865 and of the German Palestine Society in 1878 provided the 
machinery for co-operative effort. American and German Schools 
of Archaeology have been established in Jerusalem. Lachish 
was explored by Flinders Petrie and Bliss, who discovered the 
remains of eleven cities dating from about 1700 to 400 B.C. The 
secrets of Megiddo have been unveiled by Schumacher, to whom 
we also owe our scanty knowledge of Samaria. Sellin can point 
to fruitful labours at Taanach and Jericho. The historic life 
of Gezer has been minutely revealed by Macalister, the strata of 
seven cities reaching to the neolithic age. The most piquant 
result of his excavations has been to rehabilitate the Philistines, 
the authors of the most artistic objects found in the accumulations 
of two thousand years. We can now trace Palestine back far into 
the third millennium, and watch the cave-dwellers being gradually 
dispossessed by Semite invaders. A partial excavation of Jerusa- 
lem has revealed a network of prehistoric tunnels and aqueducts. 
But the most sensational finds come from beyond the borders of 
Israel and Judah. The Moabite stone, the earliest inscription in 
a Semitic alphabet, dating from the time of Ahaziah and Jehoso- 
phat, was discovered in 1868. Assyrian inscriptions, among 
them those of Sargon and Sennacherib describing the capture of 
Samaria and the siege of Jerusalem under Hezekiah, supplement 
the Old Testament narrative at many points. The Tel-el- 
Amarna letters, which throw a bright searchlight on the politics 
and culture of Palestine in the fourteenth century, speak of the 
Chabiri, whom some scholars believe to be the Hebrews. The 
much -discussed inscription of Meneptha found by Petrie in 1896 
has been pronounced by a few judges to denote the existence of 
Israelites under his rule in Palestine. No decisive evidence of a 
sojourn of Israel in Egypt has come to light. The discovery in 
1904 of papyri records of a Jewish military colony at Elephantine, 
an island near the first cataract, throws welcome light on the fifth 
century. Aramaic had already supplanted Hebrew, and though 
worshippers of Jahveh the settlers were not monotheists. 

The most notable feature of recent Old Testament study has 
been the discussion of the debt of the Jews to Babylonian religion 
and culture. It was not, however, until Delitzsch delivered a 
lecture in Berlin in 1902 that the relationship became a topic of 
universal discussion. ' Babel and Bible' sold by tens of thousands, 
and was followed at intervals by a series of discourses confirming 



THE JEWS AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 533 

and developing its contentions. Till recently, he declared, CHAP. 
Israel had been held to be one of the oldest of civilisations XXVI 
and to have formed a world by itself, while the Old Testament 
was regarded as the main authority for the Ancient East. But 
an older and vaster civilisation had been discovered from which 
Israel derived not only her science but her religion. The Tel-el- 
Amarna tablets revealed the supremacy of Babylonian culture 
from the Euphrates to the Nile, and the Israelites drew in its 
influence with their earliest breath. The saga of the Flood arose 
naturally in a land subject to constant inundations. The 
Creation legends were Babylonian, the creator being the God 
Marduk. The story of the forbidden fruit, the serpent and 
the fall appears on a Babylonian cylinder. Babylonian idols 
were no more heathen than Roman Catholic images. Though 
polytheism prevailed, the idea of a supreme God was general. 
The moral level of Babylonian civilisation was not conspicuously 
lower than that of Israel, and the position of women, a legacy 
from the Sumerians, was distinctly higher. Astronomy was 
invented in the plains of Mesopotamia, with the division of the 
hour into sixty minutes and the minute into sixty seconds. The 
Jews were no more original in religion and ethics than in science 
and law. 

The attack on the originality of the Jews brought the cham- 
pions of tradition into the field. The fiercest rejoinder came from 
Hommel, the Sayce of Germany, who roundly declared that what 
was new in the lectures was not true. The Israelites, he asserted, 
made their own religion. Delitzsch was wrong in his conception 
of Babylonian monotheism, and Biblical origins were Chaldaic, 
not Babylonian. The Pentateuch, though not the work of Moses, 
was composed not very long after his time, and Canaanite- 
Babylonian influences only appeared in additions. Less rigidly 
conservative scholars were also far from satisfied. The science 
was so young, declared Kittel, that some sensation-mongering was 
inevitable. The differences between the cosmology of Babylon 
and the Bible were fundamental. Babylonia was heathen, 
the Bible monotheist. The elements taken from Babylon were 
transmuted, and the later form was more truly original than the 
first conception. Israel turned dross into gold ; Babylonia was 
a quarry, not a model. Delitzsch held his ground tenaciously, 
offering fresh illustrations of his central thesis, for which the 
excavations at Babylon supplied him with new material. 

The immeasurable indebtedness of the Jews to Babylonia is 
equally the message of Winckler, who elaborated the astral 
theory of Babylonian religion, and of Jeremias and Zimmern, 



534 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, who have followed in his footsteps. In his ' History of Israel ' 
XXVI the former contends that the legends from Abraham to Solomon 
belong to a system resting on Babylonian astrology. In his 
ingenious book, ' The Old Testament in the Light of the Ancient 
East/ Jeremias works out the influence in detail. He claims 
that Babylonia was the source of the highest conceptions found 
among the Jews, and that while the popular religion of the 
Israelites was pagan, the pure cult of Jahveh, which came from 
Babylonia, was the faith of the leaders. So permanent was the 
Babylonian influence that it is to be found in the Book of 
Revelation. The speculations of Winckler and his school, 
however fanciful, like the lectures of Delitzsch, however ex- 
aggerated, have served to focus attention on the derivation of 
Jewish religion. The exact nature of the debt to Babylonia it 
is still too early to decide ; but its recognition has sufficed to 
revolutionise the study of early Israel and to provide a new 
background for the religious history of the world. 



II 

The winning of ecclesiastical history * for science by Protestant 
scholarship has been one of the main tasks of the nineteenth 
century. The conflict of the Churches never slackens, the battle 
of belief and unbelief continues ; yet order and fixity are slowly 
being introduced even into such controversial territory as the 
origins of Christianity and the Reformation. 

The first detailed narrative was compiled by the Magdeburg 
centuriators ; but their ardent Protestantism found nothing but 
a steady deterioration from the primitive Church, and in the 
Bishop of Rome they detected the features of Antichrist. The 
official answer was composed by Baronius 2 with the help of the 
Vatican archives, and his mighty tomes are still the scholar's 
companion. The great duel was followed by incessant conflict 
during the seventeenth century ; but the fierce surge threw up 
many treasures on the beach, and less polemical writers, such as 
the Anglican divines and the Benedictines of St. Maur, laid the 
foundation on which future scholars could build. The reaction 
against the hard-shelled formalism in which the Lutheran 

1 See Ter Haar, De Historiographie der Kerkgeschiedenis, 2 vols., 1870 ; 
Baur, Die Epochen der Kirchlichen Geschichtschreilbung, 1852 ; Headlam, 
' Methods of Early Church History,' in his History, Authority and 
Theology, 1909 ; and Bratke, Wegweiser zur Quellenkunde der Kirchen- 
geschiohte, 1890. 

2 See Mark Pattison, Isaac Casaubon, ch. vi., 1875. 



THE JEWS AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 535 

Church was imprisoned gave birth to pietism ; and it was in CHAP. 
the conviction that the Christian life was of infinitely higher XXVI 
value than a mechanical orthodoxy that Gottfried Arnold wrote 
his ' Impartial History of Churches and Heretics ' in 1699. 1 
The Reformation had begun in a revolt against the secularisation 
of the Church, but quickly imitated its faults. Luther himself 
introduced the poison, and Melanchthon, the father of Protestant 
scholasticism, drove his countrymen further away from the 
true path. It is in this spirit that Arnold reviews the Catholic 
centuries. Recognising, like Flacius, an ever-increasing degenera- 
tion, he does not attribute it to the Papacy alone but to all the 
influences that turned the Church into a hierarchy and petrified 
Christianity into dogma. The message of Christ is to be found 
chiefly in the heretics, the heroes of the book, who arise in 
succession to protest against clericalism. Somewhat similar 
convictions inspired the writings of Semler, who contrasted the 
temporary character of dogmatic forms with the permanence 
of Christian ethics. In Mosheim 2 we miss both the dogmatic zeal 
of Flacius and the mystical piety of Arnold. He approached 
his subject in a business-like spirit, without passion or unction, 
and wrote the first ecclesiastical history which belongs to the 
modern world. For him the Church is an institution like the 
State, and his treatment is predominantly external, political, 
secular. Though lacking conviction and insight his work lifted 
the study out of the sphere of polemics, and provided a scholarly 
picture of the development of doctrine and organisation. The 
scholars of Gottingen related the history of the Church to 
secular events and rejected a mass of legendary detail, but they 
lacked insight into distant times and other modes of thought. 
Thus Spittler, the ablest of them, dismissed Athanasius as a 
clerical and Bernard as a despot. No one learned at Gottingen 
to love Church history or to reverence its grandest figures. 

The romantic movement restored feeling and imagination 
to their thrones. The Ages of Faith rose into favour, and his- 
torians cared more to trace the operation of Christian principles 
than to castigate Rome or glorify the Reformation. The 
embodiment of the new spirit was a Jew who embraced Chris- 
tianity at the age of seventeen, and took the name of Neander. 3 
Initiated into the philosophy of religion by Schleiermacher and 

1 There is an interesting chapter on Arnold in Ritschl, Geschichte des 
Pietismus, vol. ii., 1884. 

- See Heussi, Die Kirchengeschichtschreibung Mosheims, 1904. 

3 See Schaflf, August Neander, 1886 ; Harnack, Reden u. Aufsdtze, vol. i., 
1904 ; Lichtenberger, History of German Theology in the 19th Century, 1889. 



536 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, nourished on Bohme and Plato, he found the teaching of Planck 
XXVI a t Gottingen too rationalist for his taste. ' A new life of faith,' 
he declared many years later, ' had awakened which began to 
inspire study. A superficial, heartless enlightenment, which 
despised the greatness and the glory of the ages, was condemned 
both by life and by science.' He quickly learned to love the 
Fathers, and exchanged the guidance of Schelling and Schleier- 
macher for a simple pietistic Christianity. After a thesis on 
Clement of Alexandria, he wrote his first important work on 
Julian in 1812. In the following year, at the age of twenty-four, 
he was appointed to the Chair of Church History in the newly- 
founded University of Berlin, which he occupied till his death in 
1850. Monographs on St. Bernard, Gnosticism, Chrysostom and 
Tertullian followed in rapid succession. In 1822 he published 
' Memorials of Christian Life,' a gallery of portraits illustrating 
the spirit and effects of Christianity ; and in 1825 appeared the 
first volume of his ' History of the Christian Church.' 

Church history meant for Neander less the development of 
dogma or institutions than the story of Christian lives. As a 
disciple of Schleiermacher he regarded religion as above all an 
expression of feeling, its different manifestations carrying with 
them their own j ustification. Even Julian is treated sympatheti- 
cally, in view of his sincere convictions. His attitude towards 
the Gottingen school resembled that of Gottfried Arnold towards 
the dogmatists of the seventeenth century. He was not much 
interested in the Church as a Great Power. Indeed, he regarded 
its complex machinery and its secular activities as a derogation 
from the simple purity of primitive Christianity. His task was 
to emphasise the beauty and fragrance of the dedicated life, to 
make the study of Christian men and women an instrument of 
personal edification. Interrupted by death before reaching the 
Reformation, his pages breathe a spirit of gratitude for the heritage 
that is common to Rome and Wittenberg. Though profoundly 
convinced of the truth of Christian dogma, he never indulges in 
heresy-hunting or maintains the importance of doctrine apart 
from moral results. Believing Christianity to be a divine 
leaven, he seeks and finds it in an infinite variety of forms. 
The spirit of the whole work is profoundly irenic. The sym- 
pathetic handling of the great figures of the Church was a 
refreshing change from the Aufkldrung ; but it was accompanied 
by serious weaknesses. Though Neander emphasises the sacred- 
ness of individuality and protests against whatever cramps and 
limits it, his portraits tend to be a trifle monotonous. Thus, 
while he succeeds with congenial types of character, he some- 



THE JEWS AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 537 

times fails in his portraiture of the bolder and more rugged CHAP. 
personalities. He prefers the saint to the statesman, the scholar XXVI 
and the mystic to the man of action. His dislike of the worldli- 
ness of the hierarchy blinds him to the necessities of a powerful 
and permanent organisation. Further, he shared with other 
members of the Romantic school a weakness in critical questions. 
He took his sources as he found them, and never realised 
the duty of establishing their value before making use of 
their testimony. His ' Church History ' contained no new 
material and revealed no secrets. His books on the ' Apostolic 
Age ' and the ' Life of Christ,' which form a vestibule to his 
principal work, reveal even more clearly that he belongs to the 
pre-critical era. 

Neander exercised not less influence as a teacher than as a 
writer. 1 His tecture-room was crowded with eager students, 
and from his Seminar issued the scholars who were to continue 
and surpass his work. His lectures not only breathed enthusiasm 
for his subject, but inculcated an attitude towards life. He 
uttered grave warnings against excessive intellectualism, whether 
in the form of rationalism or dogmatism. Though he disliked the 
critical spirit which was springing up around him, he opposed the 
expulsion of De Wette from Berlin, and, when asked his opinion 
as to the prohibition of Strauss' ' Life of Jesus,' advised against 
it. Indeed Hengstenberg, the leader of militant orthodoxy, 
denounced him as only half a believer. No figure among the 
ecclesiastical historians of the nineteenth century is more 
attractive than that of this learned, humble and pious Christian. 
Though Church history needs more critical methods, it would be 
unjust to overlook his services in revealing its living interest. 
He made his appeal to all Christians. Mohler, who attended his 
lectures, pronounced him the first German Protestant with a 
real knowledge of the Fathers, and paid a tribute to his wonderful 
comprehension of Catholic dogmas and the early sects. Like 
Chateaubriand in France, he rescued the Christian Church from 
the half-contemptuous patronage of the Aufkldrung. By the 
translation of his work into English he may also be regarded as 
the first and most influential instructor of England and America 
in ecclesiastical history. The shorter handbook of Gieseler, in 
which a meagre narrative swims on an ocean of notes, was pre- 
ferred by scholars and teachers, but made no appeal to the 
public ; while the concise survey of Karl Hase, the most perfect 
sketch ever written, was too brief to compete. 

In 1826, the year in which the first volume of Neander's 
1 See Lenz, Geschichte der Universitdt zxi Berlin, i. 614-16, 1910, 



538 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, principal work began to appear, Ferdinand Christian Baur l was 
XXVI appointed to the Chair of Historical Theology at Tubingen. 
Standing at the opposite pole and differing in temperament, 
method and results, he exerted a far more permanent influence, 
and laid the foundations of the critical treatment of ecclesiastical 
history. Though few of the contentions of the Tubingen School 
are now accepted, the principles which it introduced gave an 
incalculable impetus to research. The son of a Wurttemberg 
pastor, Baur studied theology at Tubingen, and a work on the 
' Symbolism and Mythology of Antiquity ' won him the chair 
which he occupied till his death in i860. His lectures were 
written out and formed the basis of the publications which 
followed one another with bewildering rapidity for over thirty 
years. These writings fall roughly into three classes, dealing 
respectively with the development of dogma, the books of the New 
Testament and Church History. Baur declared that without 
philosophy history was dead and dumb. The dominating 
influence of his early life was Schleiermacher, but the more 
massive thought of Hegel gradually displaced him. Beginning 
with monographs on Manichseism and Gnosticism, he discussed 
the theory of the Atonement and the doctrine of the Trinity 
in works remarkable for their skill in connecting the links in a 
chain of ideas. It was his immense achievement to introduce 
the conception of law and growth into the world of dogma. 
' Baur's mastery in tracing the march of ideas through the ages, 
over the heads of men, was a thing new to literature.' 3 He 
interprets the dialectical development of Christian dogma as 
Hegel had interpreted that of Greek philosophy. His business 
was less with facts than with ideas. The idea, not the fact, of 
the Resurrection was the basis of the Christian faith. Whether 
the event occurred he declares a question beyond the scope of 
history. This impersonal standpoint rendered the scientific 
study of dogma possible ; and he was right in recognising that 
it is no necessary part of the historian's duty to pronounce 
whether Christianity be a natural or supernatural phenomenon. 
In a second group of writings Baur grappled with the date and 
authorship of the books of the New Testament. He approached 
his task in the conviction that they must be studied in exactly 
the same way as any other documents, and that the personality 

1 See Zeller's masterly essays, ' F. C. Baur ' and ' Die Tubinger 
historische Schule,' Vortrdge und Abhandlungen, vol. L, 1875 ; Weizsacker, 
F. C. Baur, 1892 ; Mark Pattison, ' The Present State of Theology in Ger- 
many,' Essays, vol. ii. ; Pfleiderer, Development of Theology since Kant, 1890, 

2 Acton, 



THE JEWS AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 539 

and standpoint of the writer must be taken into account. While CHAP, 
earlier scholars devoted their chief attention to the Gospels, XXVI 
Baur started with the writings of Paul. It is indeed his concep- 
tion of the great Apostle of the Gentiles which dominates his 
view of early Christianity. The key to the whole period seemed 
to him to lie in the opposition between Peter and Paul. Christian- 
ity, he declared, was not a complete revelation, but a complex 
of ideas and tendencies which developed gradually. It was at 
first wholly Jewish, the early Christians recognising Jesus as the 
fulfilment of the Messianic prophecies. It was Paul who made 
Christianity a universal religion, and in so doing he broke with 
the Twelve. This struggle of Pauline universalism and Petrine 
Judaism enables us to date the Canonical books. Romans, Ga- 
latians and Corinthians, which clearly reflect the controversy, 
are the only authentic epistles. The writings in which the conflict 
is toned down date from the era of compromise in the second 
century, when the dangers from Gnosticism on the one hand and 
persecution on the other compelled the leaders to put aside their 
quarrels. Among these late works are the Gospels, which were 
compiled from narratives now lost. Matthew is the nearest to 
these primitive writings, as it most faithfully reproduces the 
Judseo-Christian atmosphere. Luke comes from the other camp, 
but has been modified for the purposes of conciliation. Mark is 
later stiU, as all traces of the antagonism have disappeared. John 
is a philosophical, not an historical work. Acts are an ingenious 
attempt at conciliation. This bold reconstruction gave an 
immense impetus to study ; but the edifice was built on sand. 
He enormously exaggerated the antagonism in the primitive 
Church, and neglected other forces and movements. Above all 
he takes little account of the personality of Jesus Christ. It has 
often been said that in Baur's eyes Paul was the founder of Christ- 
ianity. He thinks of Christ as the author of a system of ideas 
which the disciples discussed, rather than as a person whom they 
followed. His dating of books according to their attitude towards 
the strife of Petrinism and Paulinism falls to the ground with the 
contention on which it is used. It is sufficient condemnation of 
the hypothesis that it compels him to place Matthew first and 
Mark last of the synoptics. 

A third group of writings, relating to the general history of 
the Christian Church, was the main occupation of the last decade 
of his life. They were preceded by his precious monograph on 
ecclesiastical historians, in one and all of whom he detects the 
lack of synthetic ideas and insight into the processes of evolution. 
The first volume, devoted to the first three centuries, appeared 



540 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, in 1853, and possesses importance as a summary of the views 
XXVI he had long been enunciating. A second appeared in 1859, and 
three more, completing the survey, were published after his death, 
the last two being merely a reproduction of his lectures. His 
strength lay in the early centuries, and his studies of mediaeval and 
modern times possess no special authority. His devoted pupil and 
colleague, Zeller, declares the ' Church History ' the most perfect 
in form and method, though not the most important, of his works. 
He is at his best in tracing the development of ideas, at his worst 
in dealing with individuals. While Neander's approach is from 
the emotions, that of Baur is from the intellect. Both views are 
radically incomplete. Yet Baur, like Neander, rendered immense 
services. Much of his work, above all in the interpretation of 
dogma, is of permanent value, and even his mistakes are often 
suggestive. His unrivalled erudition, his capacity for abstract 
thought, his unceasing output, the long tenure of his chair, made 
the Tubingen Professor by far the most influential Protestant 
theologian of his time. There was nothing of the iconoclast about 
him. Weizsacker has testified that no orthodox believer need 
have been deterred from entering the Ministry by attending 
his lectures. He treated the rise of Christianity as an historical 
phenomenon, leaving his hearers to determine whether it was 
human or divine. 

Baur's influence was increased by the fact that he was sur- 
rounded by a group of distinguished disciples, who co-operated 
with him in the endeavour to rescue the early Church for science. 
The most famous of his pupils, however, cannot be reckoned a 
member of his school. While Baur devoted his main attention 
to the Apostolic age, Strauss x attempted to separate the legen- 
dary from the historical elements in the Gospels, and denied the 
divinity of Christ. The sensational challenge led to a more critical 
examination of the sources ; and without the leaven of Strauss 
and Baur the study of Christian origins would have made far 
less rapid progress. The most brilliant member of the Tubingen 
school, properly so called, was Schwegler, 2 better known as the 
historian of early Rome, whose important work on the Post- 
Apostolic age summarised the master's results, and exaggerated 
the antagonism of Peter and Paul. More cautious was Zeller, who, 
after attempting a critical examination of the Acts, deserted 
theology for philosophy. Hilgenfeld displayed greater independ- 
ence, placing the synoptics earlier, and extending the list of 

1 See Hausrath, D, F, Strauss, 2 vols. ,1876-8, and Eck, D. F. Strauss, 
1899. 

2 See Zeller's notice, Vortrdge u. Abhandlungen, vol. 2. 



THE JEWS AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 541 

authentic Pauline writings. If Hilgenfeld can only be described CHAP, 
with reserve as a member of the Tubingen school, Ritschl, 1 the XXVI 
most brilliant and influential theologian who ever attended the 
lectures of Baur, stands clearly outside it. His ' Origin of the 
Early Church,' written in 1850 and recast in 1857, reduced the 
antagonism of Petrinism and Paulinism to its proper dimensions. 
His analysis of Paul's teaching revealed elements more closely 
allied to Judaic Christianity than Baur allowed, and he success- 
fully challenged the long duration of Petrinism. An equally 
radical departure from the master's chief contentions was made 
by Weizsacker. Critical opinion now accepts more of the Pauline 
Epistles than Baur, and places the Synoptic Gospels and the Acts 
in the later decades of the first century. The paradoxes of Loman, 
Van Manen and Drews have not been taken very seriously by 
scholars. 

Immense progress has been made in every department of 
Church history since the death of Baur. The necessity of a 
careful study of the soil out of which Christianity grew has been 
recognised, and the works of Schurer and Bousset, Hausrath, 
Pfleiderer and Wendland have recreated the world into which 
Christ was born. The debt of the early Church to Greece has 
been brilliantly assessed by Hatch. Holtzmann and Jiilicher 
summarised the scholarship of a century in their Introductions 
to the New Testament. Zahn devoted a laborious life to the 
history of the Canon. In his ' Apostolic Times ' Weizsacker, 
the successor of Baur at Tubingen, described with incomparable 
power and serenity the early Christian communities, their 
distribution and institutions, their customs and beliefs, and 
drew an impressive portrait of Paul. More recently Wernle has 
reconstructed the beginnings of Christianity with vivacity and 
insight. The constitution of the primitive Church has given 
rise to prolonged controversy. The first important step was 
taken by Rothe, 2 who was rather a thinker than an historian ; 
and the first part of his only historical work is devoted to a 
discussion of the idea of the Church, which he defined as 
a means not an end. He contends that Christ did not found a 
Church, and that the first disciples thought more of their message 
than of organisation. Before the fall of Jerusalem there were 
only isolated congregations. It was only when the Apostles 
died and doctrinal differences began to threaten that episcopacy 
was born. Rothe's main conclusions were to be confirmed by 

1 See O. Ritschl, Albrecht Ritschl, 2 vols., 1894-6. 

2 See Nippold, Richard Rothe, 2 vols,, 1873, and Hausrath, Rothe u, Seine 
Freunde, 2 vols., 1902. 



542 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. Ritschl and Weizsacker, by Lightfoot's massive dissertations 
XXVI an( j by Hatch's Lectures on the ' Organisation of the Early 
Church.' 

The most impressive picture of democratic origins was 
drawn by Sohm in 1892 as an introduction to his study of Canon 
Law. 1 The Church, declared the famous Leipsic jurist, is 
spiritual, while law is worldly ; therefore Canon Law is in 
opposition to the essence of the Church. The Catholic asserts 
that the constitution of Pope, bishop and priest is divine, while 
the Anglican builds on the bishop, the Presbyterian on the 
presbyter. The earliest officers were, however, not teachers but 
administrators, their task not spiritual but secular. Whether 
they were copied from the Synagogue or heathen associations 
or from neither is of no great importance. The organisation 
was purely local, for the early Christians were simply the people 
of Christ, a community, not a Church. ' Where two or three 
are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of 
them.' Not till the middle of the second century did the danger 
of Gnosticism lead to the creation of a Church, the demand for 
organisation proving stronger than the confidence in God's 
guidance. ' The history of Church law is the history of the 
progressive disfigurement of Christian truth.' Thus Christianity 
was lost in Catholicism. From bishop to Pope was but a step, 
and the Vatican decrees of 1870 followed logically from the 
great apostasy, the identification of the invisible with the 
visible Church. This conception of early Christianity was set 
forth with extraordinary power and ample learning ; but its 
obvious exaggerations were gently corrected by Harnack, 2 who 
pointed out that organisation was natural as well as necessary, 
that a soul needed a body, and that law aimed at embodying 
Christian ideals. The evolution of dogma, in the next place, 
has been studied with zeal and profit. Among the innumerable 
apologetic works provoked by Strauss' ' Life of Jesus ' Dorner's 
' History of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ ' holds the 
highest place. Breathing the spirit of Schleiermacher and 
Neander and tracing the Person of Christ through the ages as 
the dominant fact in Christian life and thought, his monumental 
treatise still remains an indispensable companion to the student. 
Not less important was Ritschl's study of the theory of Justifica- 
tion. Of still higher value is the work of Ritschl's greatest 
disciple, Harnack, whose ' History of Dogma ' is the first 
complete survey of the whole field, equally remarkable for its 

1 Kirchenrecht, vol. L, 1892. 

2 Constitution and Law of the Church, Appendix, 1910. 



THE JEWS AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 543 

boundless learning, its philosophic insight and its arresting CHAP, 
literary qualities. XXVI 

The history of the early Church was related for the first time 
in popular form in Renan's sparkling volumes. 1 In his youthful 
work, the ' Future of Science,' written in 1849, he declared 
that a history of the origins of Christianity, if scientifically 
written, would revolutionise thought and would be the most 
important book of the nineteenth century. His mission to 
Phoenicia in i860 gave him the opportunity of visiting the Holy 
Land, where the plan of a life of Jesus and a study of the origins 
of Christianity was formed. The Vie de Jesus, though the most 
celebrated part of the work, possesses the least value. The use 
of the fourth Gospel as an authority was a fundamental error, 
and the conception of Christ satisfied neither believers nor free- 
thinkers. ' The Apostles ' sketched Jewish, Roman and Christ- 
ian society, and illustrated the enthusiasm of a nascent religion 
by the rise and persecutions of Babism. The volume on Paul is 
scarcely more adequate than the Vie de Jesus. His influence on 
Christianity is pronounced to be wholly unfavourable. He was 
the father of theology, who transformed Christianity from ethics 
into dogma. He was a great man of action, but neither saint, 
savant nor poet. He did little for religion, and his place in the 
Christian hierarchy is below St. Francis and Thomas a Kempis. 
1 Antichrist ' centres in the Neronian persecution. The fifth and 
sixth volumes cover the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian and sketch 
the rise of Gnosticism. The concluding volume, which bears the 
name of Marcus Aurelius, presents a dazzling panorama of the 
pagan world when the triumph of Christianity is within sight. 
The transcendent importance of the drama, the encyclopaedic 
learning, the sympathy with different forms of thought, the vivid 
description of historic localities and the scintillating narrative 
won it instant popularity. It presented France with a welcome 
contrast to Pressense's volumes of edification and Ernest Havet's 
aggressive rationalism. While Baur records the rise and fall 
of theories, Renan exhibits a pageant of living men. Yet; 
despite the foundation of solid learning, the Origines suggest 
something of the dilettante. While no subsequent work has 
displaced it from its pedestal of popularity, it belongs to the class 
rather of literary than of scientific histories. 

Our knowledge of the early Church has been enormously in- 
creased during recent decades by the aid of archaeology and 
inscriptions. Ramsay's explorations in Asia Minor, above all 
in Phrygia, have recovered some almost unknown chapters, and 
1 See note on page 527. 



544 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, enabled him to throw new light on the journeys of St. Paul and 
XXVI to present a vivid picture of the ' Church in the Roman Empire.' 
The relations of the State and the Christian communities and 
the extent and nature of the persecutions have been lucidly 
treated by Neumann. Lightfoot's superb editions of Clement, 
Ignatius and Polycarp have lit up the life and organisation of 
the second century, and Professor Gwatkin has written on 
Arianism with rare power and insight. The ' Dictionary of 
Christian Biography ' is a noble monument of British scholarship. 
But no man, alive or dead, has done so much for the early Church 
as Harnack. The Texte und Unlersuchungen, which he has 
edited since 1882 and to which he has contributed innumerable 
monographs, have illuminated every corner of the first three 
centuries. He suggested and directed the Berlin Academy's 
edition of the Ante-Nicene Fathers. As editor of the Theologische 
Liter atw zeitung he has followed and criticised every phase 
of scholarship. His New Testament studies, though the least 
authoritative of his achievements, are full of acute discussion. 
His ' History of Dogma ' is an indispensable guide through the 
maze of speculation. His vast survey of ' Christian Literature 
till Eusebius ' is a monument of exact learning and critical 
acumen. His study of the ' Constitution of the Early Church ' 
summarises the results of two generations of research. Above 
all, the 'Mission and Expansion of Christianity,' his chief his- 
torical work, attempted a detailed survey of the actual growth 
of the Christian community before the conversion of Constantine. 
He shows that the Jewish communities were the basis of 
Christian expansion. Christianity, he declares, possessed every 
quality inviting acceptance — the Person of the Saviour and the 
healer, the gospel of charity and the pure life, and a marvellous 
power of assimilating foreign elements. It seized every aspect 
of the life of man, and provided the form for the syncretistic 
monotheism towards which the world was feeling its way. 

The rise of Islam, which affected the Christian Church at so 
many points, was not seriously investigated till the middle 
of the nineteenth century. The first step was taken by Weil, a 
German Jew, who learned Arabic under de Sacy. On the basis 
of the earliest sources available in Europe he compiled a life of 
the prophet, the conclusions of which reached a wider circle of 
readers in the pages of Washington Irving. More important 
was his ' History of the Khalifs,' a conscientious paraphrase of the 
Arab historians, printed and imprinted. The second step was 
taken by Sprenger, whose massive volumes on the life and teaching 
of the prophet, though fifty years old, are still of use. The 



THE JEWS AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 545 

sketch of religious movements in Arabia before Mohammed and CHAP, 
the exhaustive study of the Koran, to the comprehension of which XXVI 
he boasted that he had provided the key, were among the most 
striking features of the book. For the prophet himself he had but 
slender admiration. He castigates his ungovernable sensuality, 
declares him weak and hysterical, and denies him genius. His 
low opinion of the prophet was shared by Muir, whose larger and 
smaller biographies first supplied the English-speaking world with 
a trustworthy account of the rise of Islam based on first-hand 
acquaintance with the sources. No more valuable contribution 
to the history of early Mohammedanism has been made than 
De Goeje's monumental edition of Tabari. More recently the 
Prince of Teano has begun to compile the annals of early Islam 
from the whole extant material. 

The ecclesiastical history of the Middle Ages has been known 
to English readers for half a century chiefly through Milman's 
' History of Latin Christianity.' l Devoting his early manhood 
to poetry, drama and theology he won fame by a singularly 
independent 'History of the Jews.' 'It is splendid,' wrote 
Lockhart, ' but some wise folks shake their heads at some 
passages about miracles. You would disarm them by writing 
a history of Christianity.' Milman acted on the advice and 
produced a history of the early Church of no great importance. 
The work, however, to which it served as an introduction 
ranks with the outstanding historical achievements of the 
early Victorian era. The ' History of Latin Christianity ' from 
Theodosius to the eve of the Reformation relieved England 
from Newman's reproach that she possessed no ecclesiastical 
history but Gibbon. His friend Stanley declared it ' indis- 
pensable and inestimable, a complete epic and philosophy of 
mediaeval Christendom.' The testimony of Froude was no 
less handsome. ■ You have written the finest historical work 
in the English language. Calmness and impartiality, a belief 
that in a divinely governed world no systems of faith or policy 
have taken enduring hold on mankind unless the truth in them 
has been greater than the falsehood — these are essentials of 
a great writer, and these you possess more than anyone who 
has taken such subjects in hand.' Unlike Milner and Neander, 
Milman had no desire to edify his readers. He portrayed the 
Church rather as an institution than as an influence. He was 
more interested in action than in thought or feeling, and his 
mind was essentially secular. Like Stanley he cared relatively 

1 See A. Milman, Memoir of H. H. Milman, 1900 ; and Lecky, 
Historical Essays, 1908, 

2 N 



546 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, little for doctrines and doctrinal controversy. Dean Church, 
XXVI w hile recognising his power and impartiality, complained that 
he lacked a due appreciation of the reality and depth of those 
eternal problems of thought and feeling which have made 
theology. Yet this detachment saved him from the hostility to 
Catholicism then common among Protestant historians ; and 
he detested credulity, intolerance and sacerdotalism wherever 
they appeared. He fully recognised the greatness of certain 
Popes and the immense contribution of monasticism and the 
mediaeval Church to European civilisation. Macaulay declared 
that though the substance of the book was excellent, the style 
was bad. It certainly lacks grace and colour ; but it possesses 
something of the solid strength of Grote. To those who knew 
him, testifies Lecky, the man seemed even greater than his 
work. ' Very few historians,' he adds, ' have combined in 
larger measure the three great requisites of knowledge, soundness 
of judgment and inexorable love of truth.' 

The best work on the mediaeval Church is naturally to be 
found in monographs. Reuter drew a full-length portrait of 
Alexander III, Luchaire of Innocent III. Sabatier produced the 
biography of St. Francis for which the world had been waiting. 
Hauck has devoted his life to a work of incomparable thorough- 
ness on the Church in Germany. Moll's volumes on the Nether- 
lands possess interest far beyond the national frontier. Hook 
wrote the lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury. The evolution 
of Canon Law has been traced with masterly insight and learning 
by Richter and his greatest pupil Hinschius. Renan measured 
the disturbing influence of Averroes, and Lechler of Wyclif. 
But no one accomplished so much as Henry Charles Lea, whose 
' History of the Mediaeval Inquisition ' was rightly described by 
Acton as the most important contribution of the New World 
to the religious history of the Old, and whose works on Sacer- 
dotal Celibacy, the Spanish Inquisition, Confession and Indul- 
gences, and the Ordeal repay diligent study. His boundless 
erudition excites the more astonishment that it was acquired 
during the leisure of a publisher's life and that his materials for 
the most part had to be copied and sent across the Atlantic. 
Though lacking distinction of style and sympathy with the 
Church, 1 these massive monographs carry a precious freight, 
and light up many curious tracts of human experience. The 
opening of the Vatican archives in 1881 has supplied mediaevalists 
with an overwhelming mass of fresh material, and the French 
School at Rome has published many a precious volume of the 
1 See Baumgarten's attack, H. C. Lea's Historical Writings, 1909. 



THE JEWS AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 547 

Papal letters. The most sensational of recent additions to CHAP. 
knowledge is Dr. Stein's discovery of Manichaean documents XXVI 
in Turkestan, which reveal a sect hitherto known only through 
the refracting medium of its enemies. 

It is natural that Protestants not less than Catholics should 
devote special attention to the Reformation. No historian 
of the mighty struggle has enjoyed such boundless popularity 
as Merle d'Aubigne ; and for half a century the Protestant 
world nourished itself on works which portrayed Luther and 
Calvin with an aureole round their head. The pious Swiss pastor 
had studied the writings of the Reformers with loving care ; but 
his volumes belong to the literature of edification and are now 
almost forgotten. A later and more critical generation derives 
its knowledge of Luther from Kostlin, Kolde and Kawerau. 
Kostlin's biography, in its latest edition, the second volume of 
which was revised by Kawerau, represents the last word in Luther 
scholarship. In the writings of the latter we reach the highest 
achievement of Protestant scholarship. Fully alive both to the 
weaknesses of the Reformers and to the merits of their opponents, 
he approaches more closely than any Protestant historian, 
living or dead, to a dispassionate view of the conflict. 
Erasmus and Melanchthon await definitive biographies ; but 
Strauss' study of Hutten and Barge's life of Carlstadt are 
of outstanding importance. A complete edition of Luther's 
writings is in course of publication by a group of Lutheran 
scholars. The Association for the History of the Reformation, 
dating from 1883, the quatercentenary of Luther's birth, has 
issued a long series of monographs of varying value. Doumergue's 
sumptuous volumes on Calvin have erected the memorial to 
which the Genevese reformer is entitled. Canon Dixon and 
Gairdner have related the history of the transition in England 
from the standpoint of advanced Anglicanism. Beard's Hibbert 
Lectures, though nearly thirty years old, still afford the best 
survey of the general character and abiding influence of the 
Reformation. The historical, doctrinal and moral controversies 
between the Churches were analysed with masterly skill in 
Karl Hase's ' Handbook of Protestant Polemics.' 

There are few outstanding works on the Church history of 
the last three centuries. Troltsch has described the course 
and character of Protestantism with rare insight. Dorner's 
survey of Protestant theology, Schweitzer's monumental 
treatise on the 'Central Dogmas of Protestantism,' Pfleiderer's 
history of the Philosophy of Religion, Tulloch's sketch of the 
Cambridge Platonists, Ritschl's volumes on Pietism are notable 



548 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, achievements. Nippold has surveyed the whole field of Church 
XXVI history from the middle of the eighteenth century through the 
spectacles of an aggressive Protestantism. Abbey and Overton 
have explored the religious history of England from the Non- 
Jurors to the Reform Bill. Dean Church wrote a history of the 
Oxford Movement which combines the freshness of personal 
knowledge with a sureness of judgment against which there is 
no appeal. At the age of eighty-five Karl Hase l began to 
publish a detailed history of the entire historic life of the Church 
based on his lectures at Jena. Though lacking the exquisite 
art of his ' Handbook, ' the larger work summarises the studies 
and writings of a lifetime and forms the most complete survey 
ever attempted by a modern historian. But the greatest 
monument of Protestant scholarship is to be found in Herzog's 
' Encyclopaedia of Protestant Theology,' the third edition of 
which has appeared under the direction of Hauck. 

1 See Biirkner, Karl von Hase, 1900, and Hase's Ideale und Irrthiimer, 
1871. 



CHAPTER XXVII 

CATHOLICISM 



While the most valuable work on Church history has been CHAP, 
accomplished by Protestant scholars, contributions of real XXVII 
importance have come from the rival camp. The revival of 
the Roman Church during the generation following the downfall 
of Napoleon was felt in the domain of historical study not less 
than in social life. Its earliest and most important centre was 
South Germany, its first and most brilliant figure Mohler,' 1 who 
began to teach Church history at Tubingen shortly before Baur. 
The publication in 1825 of ' The Unity of the Church as ex- 
emplified in the Fathers ' was an event in the life of Catholic 
Germany. ' He who truly lives in the Church will also live in 
the first age of the Church and understand it ; and he who does 
not live in the present Church will not five in the old and will 
not understand it, for they are the same.' The first part dis- 
cussed the unity of the spirit, the second the unity of the body 
of the Church. The power and eloquence of the book made a 
deep impression. ' It fascinated us young men,' remarked 
Dollinger to Friedrich fifty years later. ' We felt that Mohler 
had discovered a fresh, living Christianity. The ideal of a 
Church purified from its abuses became our goal, and the 
revival of theological science would bring with it the reform 
of the Church.' Two years later a still more ambitious work, 
' Athanasius and the Church of his Time,' appeared. The book 
opens with a study of the development of Trinitarian doctrine, 
and revealed the historian's ability both to portray character 
and to analyse philosophic conceptions. His most celebrated 
1 See Friedrich, /. A. Mohler, 1894, and Knopfler, /. A. Mohler, 1896. 
The revival of German Catholicism may also be studied in Werner, 
Geschichte der Katholischen Theologie, 1866 ; Friedrich, Geschichte des 
Vatikanischen Conzils, vol. i., 1877 ; and Goyau, L' Allemagne Religieuse, 
vols, i.-ii., 1905. 



550 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, production, the ' Symbolik,' a study of the dogmatic differences 
XXVII f Protestantism and Catholicism, was the most formidable 
attack on the Reformation since Bossuet. Its aim was to prove 
from patristic literature that Protestantism was unfaithful 
to the teaching of the primitive Church. His colleague Baur 
wrote a pointed criticism, to which he replied in a supplementary 
volume, contending that his opponent argued his case from the 
standpoint of Schleiermacher and Hegel, not of the Reformers, 
and that he only defended Protestantism by misstating its 
teaching. Falling in the same years as Strauss' ' Life of Jesus,' 
the duel of Mohler and Baur gave a further impetus to the study 
of ecclesiastical history and doctrine. 

Mohler was deeply wounded by the stinging attack of his 
colleague, and willingly accepted a call to Munich. Among his 
earliest and staunchest admirers was Dollinger, who surrendered 
the Chair of Church History, taking for himself that of Canon 
Law and Doctrine. But the brilliant scholar's career in his new 
sphere was short, for he was carried off by consumption at the 
age of forty-one. The grief in Catholic Germany resembled 
the consternation in the world of classical studies on the death 
of Otfried Miiller. Both men entered the dusty world of research 
like a breath of spring, inspiring young and old alike with fresh 
enthusiasm. The publication of his remains enabled the world 
to realise even more fully its irreparable loss. A large work on 
Patrology surveyed the Christian literature of the first three 
centuries, and a generation later his lectures on Church history 
were published from the notes of pupils. Though his main 
strength lies in the early Church, he possessed a considerable 
knowledge of the Reformation. He writes with severity of 
Luther, the colossal egoist whom he compares to the world- 
conquerors bringing destruction in their train. His authority 
remained so great that when the world of Catholic scholarship was 
split by the Vatican decrees, both parties claimed his support. 
His attitude towards the Papacy was certainly not that of an 
Ultramontane. He had declared General Councils the supreme 
tribunal and the sole legitimate authority for the Church, and 
his hostility to the Jesuits was unconcealed. When the question 
of the recall of the Society to Lucerne arose, his pupil Leu 
published notes of his lectures delivered in 1831, in which he 
had bracketed the Jesuits with the Protestants and declared the 
dissolution of the Order a just punishment. But when Strauss 1 
declares that he shut his eyes to the defects of his Church and was 
never quite happy in it, he goes too far. His position was equi- 
1 Vermischte Schriften, vol. ii. 



CATHOLICISM 551 

distant from the Ultramontane and Old Catholic camps into which CHAP, 
his friends and pupils were to be divided, and it is idle to speculate XXVII 
which he would have joined. 

When Mdhler's meteoric career was over, his place as the 
leader of German theology was taken by Dollinger. 1 The son of 
a Professor at Wurzburg, his earliest friend was Platen, the scep- 
tical poet, who described him as ' very enlightened and tolerant, 
but a Christian.' A more important influence was Baader, from 
whom he learned to love the mystics. At eighteen he buried 
himself in Sarpi and set sail on the vast ocean of Baronius. He 
saw that the battle of the Churches must be fought out with the 
weapons of the historian, not of the metaphysician. When 
De Maistre's treatise on the Papacy appeared, he coldly remarked 
that it lacked historical proofs. On the publication of his first 
book in 1826 he was appointed to the Chair at Munich which he 
was to make the most influential in the Catholic world. His 
study of the Eucharist reveals intimate knowledge of the Fathers, 
and sharply attacks Protestant historians for their caricature 
of the early Church. He already appears in the role his fidelity 
to which was to lead his bark into stormy seas. ' The first and 
holiest law of the Catholic Church is to accept no dogma which is 
not based on the tradition of all the centuries.' His lectures 
covered the whole field of ecclesiastical history, and it was an 
easy task for him to write a handbook. The work grew under his 
hands, and became so large that on reaching the Reformation he 
decided not to continue it. Translated into English, French 
and Italian it carried the fame of its author throughout the 
Catholic world. 

Shortly after the publication of the second and final volume of 
the ' Church History,' a far greater work began to appear. The 
growth of rationalism and the quarrels of the sects seemed to him 
to announce the speedy downfall of Protestantism. The bond 
of a common Christianity between Rome and Wittenberg was 
loosening. The Catholic student of Protestant theology, he 
remarked, was like a man standing on the shore watching a 
little boat driven by the waves he knows not whither. He had 
welcomed Menzel's highly critical history of the Reformation, 
and regarded Ranke's volumes as a retrogression. He deter- 
mined to show how misleading was the Berlin Professor's glowing 

1 See Friedrich's great biography, 3 vols., 1 899-1901 ; Acton, ' Dollinger's 
Historical Work,' in History of Freedom and Other Essays, 1907 ; Stieve, 
Abhandlungen, 1900 ; Cornelius, Historische Arbeiten, 1899 ; Kobell, 
Conversations of Dr. Dollinger, 1892. For Ultramontane attacks see 
Michael, Dollinger, 1892, and J org, Historisch-Politische Blatter for 1890, 
237-62. 



552 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, picture of the national life, how weak the theology and how 
XXVII baneful the moral and intellectual results of the Lutheran revolt. 
He collects all the evidence he can find of evil and confusion and 
attributes it to the Reformation, above all to Luther's attack on 
' good works.' Such a method can never explain a great historic 
movement. Greeted with enthusiasm in Catholic Germany, it 
aroused angry hostility among Protestants ; but its vast length and 
unskilful arrangement rendered popularity impossible. When 
the third volume sold badly, the author discontinued his work. 
It remains a quarry in which historians of all creeds have delved, 
a treasure-house of rare and curious learning. Dollinger was now 
the uncontested chief of Catholic scholarship, and he voiced 
the demands of the Church at Frankfurt. In 1851 the discovery 
of the ' Philosophumena ' led to a sharp controversy as to its 
authorship. Dollinger accepted the attribution to Hippolytus, 
but defended the reputation of the Church. Soon after he 
published his ' Vestibule of Christianity,' an encyclopaedic survey 
of the civilisation of antiquity which drew warm commendation 
from Protestants no less than Catholics. Being ignorant of 
German, Newman had the work translated at the Oratory and 
read it with pleasure. It was quickly followed by a study of the 
' First Age of Christianity,' which was also warmly welcomed in 
conservative circles. It was the last book written by the great 
scholar before entering on the path which was to lead the 
champion of Catholicism to excommunication. 

Next to Mohler and Dollinger the name of Hefele 1 counted 
for most in the world of scholarship. After winning a solid 
reputation by twenty years of patristic, liturgical and historical 
studies and a massive biography of Ximenes, he published the 
first volume of his ' History of the Councils ' in 1855. In the 
preface to a later instalment he declares that it was his wish to 
produce an objective work ; and his volumes are by far the most 
authoritative produced by any Catholic of his time in the domain 
of Church history. His first plan had been to concentrate on 
the dogmatic aspect ; but he finally decided to include canon 
law, liturgy and morals and thus make his book of use to the 
canonist and the historian of culture. ' Till now the councils 
have been treated separately. I try to regard each as a link 
in the chain of development. 5 Thus the work grew into some- 
thing very like a history of the Church. Its value is universally 
recognised. It moves with sure foot through the labyrinth of 
dogma, and its judgments are sane and fair. With the fifth 
volume, covering the centuries from Hildebrand to the end of 

1 See articles in Allg. Deutsche Biog, and Herzog's Realencyklopddie. 



CATHOLICISM 553 

the Hohenstaufen, ' the grandest period of the Middle Ages,' the CHAP, 
work broadens into a history of the struggle of Pope and Emperor. XXVII 
After completing the Council of Constance he was appointed 
Bishop of Rottenburg ; and as his official duties and lack of access 
to a great library made research difficult he brought the work 
to an end with the Councils of Florence and Basel. Looking 
back on his achievement he repeats that he is not conscious of any 
bias. ' Have I always succeeded ? Has any historian always 
succeeded ? In magnis voluisse sat est.' Revision was begun 
in 1873 and completed by Knopfler, while the History itself was 
continued by Hergenrother at the author's wish. A fourth 
member of the Munich circle was the veteran controversialist 
Gorres. 1 A child of the Rhineland he had welcomed the French 
Revolution, but took a leading part in the opposition to Napoleon. 
With equal energy he combated the Holy Alliance, and declared 
that as the princes were arrayed against liberty, the people must 
look to Rome. As an ardent champion of Catholicism he received 
the Chair of History at Munich ; but his mind was wholly unfitted 
for systematic study. His chief historical effort was his vast 
survey of Christian Mysticism. He passes the early saints and 
Fathers in review, accepting the miracles of St. Antony and tracing 
visions and ecstasy through the ages. The second half of the work 
is devoted to evil spirits — to possession, witchcraft and magic. 
The name and fame of Gorres helped to make Munich the capital 
of Catholic Germany, but added no strength to its scholarship. 
The circle was further reinforced by the arrival of a zealous 
convert from the north. George Phillips, 3 the child of English 
parents living at Konigsberg, studied under Savigny and Eichhorn 
and began to teach law at Berlin in 1827. In the following year 
he joined the Roman Church and soon accepted a call to Munich. 
In 1845 he began to publish the vast work on Canon Law to which 
he devoted the rest of his life. Tracing everything to the Papacy, 
which he believed to have been infallible from the beginning and 
supreme over the world, his work was a resounding declaration 
of Ultramontane principles. Though adding nothing to the 
knowledge of Canon Law, its influence in Germany and Austria, 
whither he migrated in 1848, was immense, and it was one of the 
principal sources of the movement which culminated in 1870. 
By 1838 the Munich circle felt strong enough to found a journal. 
While the Tubingen Quarterly, to which Mohler and Hefele had 
been frequent contributors, was rather for scholarship than 
for propaganda, the Historisch-Politische Blatter was designed 

1 See Sepp, Gorres, 1877. 

" See Schulte's article in Allg. Deutsche Biog. 



554 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, for the defence of the Church in every field. Among minor 
XXVII members of the school may be mentioned Jarcke, Hofler and 
Lasaulx. The former, a bosom friend and fellow convert of 
Phillips at Berlin, accompanied him south. Hofler, a much more 
serious historical scholar and a pupil of Dollinger, won fame by a 
history of the German Popes and was called to Prague in 1851 
to do battle against Palacky and the champions of Hus. Lasaulx, 1 
an imposing personality, had little more aptitude for history than 
Gorres. When he read his ' Fall of Hellenism' to Dollinger, the 
great scholar shuddered at the mixture of dates and authorities ; 
and his lectures were equally incoherent. Yet all these men 
helped to make Munich the centre of Catholic studies, and future 
champions of the Church, such as Ketteler and Moufang, came 
to receive their training within its walls. 

Though the revival reached its greatest development in 
South Germany, there was a corresponding movement in France. 
When Chateaubriand had rendered Christianity fashionable, 
other voices were quickly raised in its support. Bonald 
demanded the restoration of the Jesuits, De Maistre pleaded for 
the recognition of the Pope as the anchor of Europe, Lamennais 
attacked Gallicanism and indifference. When the Bourbons 
were expelled, the revival received a new impetus from the 
hostility of Louis Philippe. Lamennais broke with Rome and 
dropped out of the fighting line ; but younger men, among them 
some of his own disciples, came forward. The struggle for the 
freedom of Catholic schools and the condemnation of the journal 
L'Avenir by the Pope had made the name of Montalembert 3 
familiar throughout France before he was thirty. His dis- 
appointments turned his eyes towards the Middle Ages. 
Travelling in Germany he reached Marburg on St. Elizabeth's 
Day, but found her forgotten and her shrine neglected by a 
Lutheran people. He followed her footsteps wherever she had 
trod, and wrote her biography. ' I do not regret the institutions 
that have perished, but I do bitterly regret the divine breath 
which animated them. Everyone knew what he was to believe, 
what he could know, what he ought to think of all those problems 
of life and destiny which to-day are sources of torment. There 
was an immense moral healthfulness which neutralised all 
the maladies of the social body. I believe the day will come 
when humanity will demand its release from the dreary waste in 
which it has been enthralled. It will ask to hear again the 
songs of its infancy, to present its thirsty lips at the breast of its 

1 See Stolzle, Ernst von Lasaulx, 1904. 

2 See the biographies by Mrs. Oliphant, 1872, and Foisset, 1877. 



CATHOLICISM 555 

mother. And that mother will come forth more beautiful, CHAP, 
powerful and merciful than ever.' The biography is a work of XXVII 
edification, not of science ; but it gave a powerful impetus to 
the Catholic revival. Perhaps its most important result was its 
share in the conversion of the incomparable gladiator, Louis 
VeuiUot. 

A far more ambitious work was the ' History of the Monks 
of the West.' His first intention was to paint a full-length 
portrait of St. Bernard ; but the introduction was ultimately 
transformed into a comprehensive history of monasticism. 
The author of the famous battle-cry, ' We are the sons of the 
Crusades and we will never yield to the sons of Voltaire,' was 
not the man for objective study. The most typical of mediaeval 
institutions is surveyed through rose-coloured spectacles. The 
Middle Ages, he declares, have been ridiculously calumniated. 
' A devouring desire to learn and to work animated every mind.' 
The picture closely resembles Kenelm Digby's 'Mores Catholici,' 
which he read with admiration before commencing his labours. 
The narrative opens with a sombre picture of the dying Empire. 
Civilisation, he declares, was rescued by the joint efforts of the 
barbarians and the monks. After a rapid sketch of the hermits 
of the desert we reach Benedict, the first great figure in the por- 
trait gallery. The narrative attains its highest flight in the 
volumes on the Irish missionaries. While rejoicing in their 
prowess he makes no attempt to exhibit them as immaculate. 
Both Columbanus and Columba were thoroughly human, the 
latter far more a fighter than a dove. He is equally alive to 
the failings of Wilfrid, whose eventful career he follows with 
loving interest. He accompanies Hildebrand from the cloister 
to the throne, and warmly supports him in the mortal struggle 
with Henry. The work was interrupted by death when the 
majestic figure of St. Bernard was almost in sight. It was 
frankly described by its author as ' a Catholic book,' and it 
suffers from the faults of propagandist literature. The famous 
orator was more at home in the tribune than the study, and 
his use of the sources is thoroughly uncritical. 

A more serious student was Ozanam, 1 whose doctor's thesis 
was a study of 'Dante and Catholic Philosophy.' In 1844 he 
succeeded Fauriel as Professor of Foreign Literature at Paris, 
and the remaining years of his short life witnessed a remarkable 
output. His ' Germanic Studies ' and his survey of civilisation 
in the fifth century sketched the beginnings of the Middle Ages. 
The ' Franciscan Poets ' was a contribution both to ecclesiastical 
1 See O'Meara, Frederic Ozanam, 187S. 



556 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, and literary history. . Dying of consumption in 1853 at the age 
XXVII f forty, he left the memory of an exquisite personality and a 
scholar of rare attainments. His devotion to the Middle Ages 
equalled that of Montalembert ; but he is free from the gush 
that sometimes disfigures the pages of his friend. His main 
task was to emphasise the services of Christianity in its influence 
on the barbarian nations. Where Gibbon had seen in the 
Church one of the destroyers of ancient culture, Ozanam pro- 
nounced it the bridge from the civilisation of Rome to the 
modern world. 

Of larger calibre was the elaborate study of ' The Church and 
the Empire in the Fourth Century ' by Albert De Broglie, 1 who 
was later to win European fame by his studies of the diplomacy 
of Louis XV and his political escapades during the Third Republic. 
No more skilled or eloquent apologia for the Church has ever 
been written. Admitting his ' profound devotion to the cause 
of the Church,' he depicts her as the wise and tender mother 
of the human race. After her ruthless persecution by the 
Pagan Empire she might have retaliated ; but she preferred 
persuasion to force. Placing the sign of the cross on Roman 
civilisation, she transformed a whole society by the moral 
effect of a doctrine, saving whatever was worth preservation in 
the ancient world. Convinced that human weakness has never 
been able to endanger the purity of her doctrine, he judges the 
actors in the drama with considerable freedom. The three great 
rulers — Constantine, Julian and Theodosius ; the three mighty 
Churchmen — Athanasius, Basil and Ambrose, fill the stage. 
He freely confesses the crimes of Constantine, the servility of 
Eusebius and the virtues of Julian ; but we are never allowed 
to forget that the Church saved the world. He confesses that 
the book was suggested by the thought that France needed 
conversion like the Roman Empire. Though she was neither 
decadent nor pagan, she had become estranged from the Church, 
and it was the act of a good patriot as well as a good Catholic 
to urge her to submit once more. The irenic tone of the book 
was sharply attacked by Gueranger, who declared that the ruin 
of paganism was unintelligible but for the intervention of God. 
The historian was further denounced for suggesting that the 
Church was rather a fount of liberty than a centre of power. 

Cretineau-Joly ~ belonged to a different school and chose 
more modern themes for his text. His admiring biographer 

1 See Fagniez, Le Due de Broglie, 1902. 

2 See Abbe Maynard, Cretineau-Joly, and Druffel, Hist. Zeitschrift, 
vol. lii. 



CATHOLICISM 557 

confesses that for him history was not an object of curiosity but CHAP, 
a weapon. Himself a Vendean, his ' La Vendee militaire ' was XXVII 
as much a polemic as a history. His friend and patron Gregory 
XVI was delighted with the book, and suggested that he should 
become the chronicler of the Jesuits. Were they not the 
Vendeans of the Church ? He responded to the appeal and 
quickly produced a voluminous history. The Jesuits assisted 
the work, believing that the public would be impressed by the 
testimony of a man who was not a member of the Order. On 
finishing his task he accepted their invitation to write a history 
of their suppression. As the book hotly attacked Clement XIV 
its sale was forbidden in the Papal States, and Theiner, the 
archivist of the Vatican, issued a reply. His later years were 
devoted to a survey of the struggle between the Church and the 
Revolution and an edition of Consalvi's Memoirs. Cretineau- 
Joly was rather a journalist than an historian, more akin to Louis 
Veuillot than to Montalembert or Ozanam ; but his access to 
documents gives some of his books a certain importance. 

While these writers were appealing to the great world of 
controversy and culture, tasks of a less popular character were 
being performed by scholars of whom the public knew little. 
Guettee composed a learned history of the Church in France, 
the fearless Gallicanism of which was rewarded by a place on 
the Index. Determined to restore the French Benedictines to 
the position they had occupied before the Revolution, Gueranger 
purchased the Benedictine Abbey of Solesmes, which had been 
deserted since 1802. He set the example of research by works on 
the early Church and the history of ritual ; but the greatest 
ornament of the abbey was his pupil and colleague Pitra, 1 whose 
researches in many archives were rewarded by a Cardinal's hat 
and the librarianship of the Vatican. In his vast undertakings 
of the ' Patrologia Grasca et Latina ' Migne received precious 
assistance from the scholars of Solesmes. Of still greater 
importance were the labours of Le Blant, whose edition of the 
Inscriptions of Christian Gaul unlocked a new world. Studied 
separately, he declared, they meant little ; studied together 
they revealed the beliefs, the hopes, the secrets of their ancestors. 
It was his aim to do for the flock what the Benedictine ' Gallia 
Christiana ' had done for the shepherds. In 1893 the aged scholar 
published a work on the Persecutions, sifting the wheat from the 
chaff and building a foundation for a critical knowledge of the 
early martyrs. 

In Italy a priceless contribution to ecclesiastical history 
1 See Cabrol, Cardinal Pitra, 1893, 



55« HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, was made by De Rossi, 1 by whom the treasures of the catacombs 
XXVII W ere first methodically explored. The marvellous underworld 
of the Eternal City had been rediscovered in the sixteenth 
century and described in the seventeenth by Bosio, whom his 
great successor hailed as the Columbus of Christian archaeology. 
He aroused the interest of Pius IX, who supplied him with money 
for excavation. The discovery of the graves of several popes 
of the third century in the catacomb of St. Callistus in 1852 
attracted the attention of the world ; and for the remaining 
forty years of his life one triumph succeeded another. He began 
the publication of the Christian inscriptions of Rome in 1861, and 
left the work almost complete at his death. But his greatest 
achievement was the sumptuously illustrated 'Roma Sotteranea,' 
which appeared in three quarto volumes between 1864 and 1877, 
and described the history, topography, architecture and frescoes 
of the catacombs. Among his other services were the foundation 
of a quarterly ' Bulletin of Christian Archaeology,' the creation of 
the Lateran museum, and an exhaustive study of the mosaics 
of the Roman churches. Mommsen, with whom he collaborated 
in the Corpus, has emphasised the combination of qualifications 
which made the founder of Christian archaeology and epigraphy 
one of the great figures of his time — his knowledge of Christian 
and classical literature, his mastery of palaeography and 
inscriptions, his intimate acquaintance with the Roman Empire 
and with the classical and mediaeval city. If he is guilty in his 
enthusiasm of exaggerating the age and influence of early 
Christianity in Rome, no one can deny his immense contribution 
to the history alike of the Roman Empire and the Christian 
Church, of art and liturgy, dogma and discipline. 



II 

It was but for a short time that Catholics could congratulate 
themselves on the revival of historical scholarship. In the 
fifties there were a few rumblings of the coming storm. In the 
sixties an internecine struggle broke out. In 1870 the Vatican 
decrees embodied the triumph of Ultramontanism and drove 
the Old Catholics into the wilderness. These great events, of 
infinite importance to the life of the Church, exerted also an 
incalculable influence on the study of history. 

After Dollinger had split with the Church it became fashion- 
able to declare that he had been a heretic while he was still re- 

1 See Baumgarten, G. B. de Rossi, 1892 ; Guiraud, in Revue Historique 
vol: lviii. ; Mommsen, in Reclen unci Aujsaize, 1905. 



CATHOLICISM 559 

garded as the champion of Catholic claims. There was, however, CHAP, 
no public indication of heterodoxy before the celebrated lectures XXVII 
at the Odeon in 1861, in which he declared that the fall of the 
Temporal Power was not improbable and would not be fatal. 
' The Church and the Churches/ written in the same year, an 
expansion and explanation of the lectures, was intended as an 
apologia for Catholicism ; and Pius IX declared that though he 
could not agree with everything in it, it could do nothing but 
good. But the references to the Reformation showed that a 
different spirit had come over him, and the suspicions aroused 
by the Odeon lectures were confirmed by the brilliant little 
volume on the ' Papal Fables of the Middle Ages.' He sharply 
attacked the Syllabus of 1864, and in 1867 he challenged the 
oecumenical character of the Council of Trent on the ground that 
it was dominated by Rome and packed with Italian bishops. 
' What would my old friends Mohler and Gorres have said,' he 
wrote in 1868, ' if they had lived to see such times ? They would 
have said to the Ultramontanes, " Away with you, we have no 
dealings with you." ' When the Vatican Council was summoned 
and its object announced, Dollinger, under the pseudonym of 
Janus, wrote the most famous of all his books, ' The Pope 
and the Council,' the most overwhelming historical indictment 
ever brought against Ultramontanism. Though promptly placed 
on the Index, it was read all over the world and mobilised 
opinion against Infallibility before the Council met. While it 
was sitting he kept up a running fire in his ' Letters of Quirinus ' 
in the Allgemeine Zeitung, based on information sent from 
Rome by Acton, Friedrich and Strossmayer. The victory of the 
Ultramontanes was followed by the excommunication of the 
historian and the foundation of the Old Catholic Church. The 
closing years of his life were mainly devoted to the revision of his 
knowledge. Precious sparks flew from his forge in his ' Lectures on 
Reunion ' and his addresses to the Munich Academy ; but though 
he laboured with undiminished energy till his death at the age 
of ninety, he would have communicated to the world little of the 
vast stores of knowledge he had accumulated but for the help of 
Reusch, who aided him to prepare for publication his early 
researches into mediaeval sects, his edition of Bellarmine's 
Autobiography and his masterly survey of the moral con- 
troversies in the Roman Church during the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries. Though he was the greatest figure among 
Catholic ecclesiastical historians of the nineteenth cenLury, his 
writings are but a faint reflection of his all-embracing knowledge. 
Dollinger was revered as their leader by a number of younger 



560 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, scholars who shared his hostility to the Vatican decrees. Among 
XXVII them was Reusch, 1 a native of Westphalia, who when the crisis 
arrived unhesitatingly followed his old master. ' I cannot act 
against my conviction,' he told his bishop. ' You speak too much 
of conviction,' was the reply. ' I have always respected you ; 
your only fault was that you thought too much of science and 
too little of authority.' After taking an active part in the 
foundation of the Old Catholic Church, he withdrew on the 
abolition of clerical celibacy. A monograph on Luis de Leon, 
one of the causes celebres of the Spanish Inquisition, was followed 
by a searching analysis of the trial of Galileo. But it is by his 
monumental work on the ' Index of Forbidden Books ' that his 
name will endure. Its two thousand pages cast a broad ray of 
light on the inner history of the last three centuries, and leave 
an overwhelming impression of the desolating obscurantism of 
Rome. Though Reusch shone rather as a collector of material 
than as a literary artist, the work is perhaps the greatest achieve- 
ment of Old Catholic scholarship. 

Even more intimately associated with Dollinger was Fried- 
rich, his pupil, colleague and biographer, who accompanied 
Cardinal Hohenlohe as his theologian to the Vatican Council. 
He published his diary of the eventful months in Rome, edited the 
official documents, and then proceeded to compile the history of 
the Council. The massive introductory volume, which contains 
a panoramic survey of the growth of Ultramontanism, is, despite 
its obvious bias, a work of enduring value. On his master's death, 
the affectionate pupil composed the monumental biography 
which is at once a noble testimony to their friendship and a con- 
tribution of rare interest to the ecclesiastical history of the nine- 
teenth century. Among other members of the circle none was 
more valued than Johannes Huber. Though he never wrote 
a large work, his knowledge of Church history was profound, 
and he rendered his master timely assistance in ' The Pope and 
the Council.' When Infallibility was proclaimed, he continued 
the struggle in his work on the Jesuits, dedicated to Dollinger, 
who, with Reusch, Friedrich and Acton had aided him in the 
task. It was, he explained, just a century since Clement XIV 
had dissolved the Order ; but it had risen from its ashes and 
now freedom and culture were threatened by its deadly embrace. 
Though the author was a hostile witness, it is still the best general 
survey of its foundation and constitution, its doctrines and 
practice, its influence in Church and State, its foreign missions, 
its educational system and its struggle with Jansenism. 
1 See Goetz, F. H. Reusch, 1901. _ 



CATHOLICISM 561 

Equally bound to Dollinger by friendship and community of CHAP, 
principles was Cornelius, 1 of whom Ranke thought so highly XXVII 
that he endeavoured to secure him a Chair at the age of twenty- 
one. He won fame in 1855 by his study of the Anabaptists at 
Munster, and in the following year he and Sybel were called to 
Munich by Maximilian II. Cornelius worked quietly among 
his pupils till his death in 1903, producing little but fragments 
and preparing for publication Kampschulte's biography of 
Calvin. Among younger members of the circle were Lossen and 
Druffel, whose early death was a grievous blow to the cause 
of liberal Catholic scholarship. The former's monograph on the 
' War of Cologne ' explored an important episode in the Counter- 
Reformation ; and as Secretary of the Munich Academy he 
aided Dollinger in the publication of his Academic Addresses. 
The latter devoted his strength to the collection of materials 
for the history of the Counter-Reformation and the Council 
of Trent. To complete the survey of Old Catholic scholarship 
three more names must be mentioned. Maassen, Professor 
of Law at Graz, issued the first volume of a work on the sources 
and literature of Canon Law, which, though a fragment, is a 
monument of erudition. Langen's massive ' Church History ' till 
Innocent III is of interest as the only detailed survey of the 
early Middle Ages from the pen of an Old Catholic. Finally 
Schulte issued an exhaustive history of the sources of Canon 
Law, and compiled the most authoritative account of the Old 
Catholic movement, in which he had played a prominent and 
honourable part. 

Ill 

While Dollinger, Reusch, Schulte and most of their friends 
rejected the Vatican Decrees, they were accepted by other 
scholars of scarcely less distinction. To the amazement of his 
acquaintances Hefele submitted, though with obvious reluctance. 
Their most active champion was Hergenrother, who had won 
fame by his study of Photius, one of the greatest monographs in 
the whole field of Church history. When ' Janus ' was carrying 
public opinion by storm, he came forward with a reply which 
suggested that Ultramontanism possessed a longer pedigree than 
Dollinger was disposed to admit. His later years were devoted 
to a handbook of Church history and to the continuation of 
Hefele. His volumes, which conclude the fifteenth and com- 
mence the sixteenth century, derive value from the documents 

1 See Friedrich, Rede auj Cornelius, 1904. 



562 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, of the Vatican, of which he was appointed archivist. His 

XXVII services were recognised by a Cardinal's hat. No Ultramontane 

has possessed such knowledge of the whole range of ecclesiastical 

history ; and no other scholar could have ventured without 

effrontery to cross swords with Dollinger. 

Of the historians who welcomed the new Ultramontanism 
the most influential was Janssen. 1 A son of the Rhineland he 
was brought up in a strongly Catholic atmosphere, and his 
mother took him with her on pilgrimages. He refused to believe 
that the Middle Ages, which created Gothic cathedrals, were a 
time of darkness. In 1854, at the age of twenty-five, he was 
appointed Professor of History for Catholic students at the 
gymnasium of Frankfurt, and passed the rest of his life in the 
Imperial city. The dominant influence in his life was that of 
Bohmer, a Catholic in everything but name. Stopping before a 
statue of Charles the Great he remarked, ' This shows us what 
we lack — a history of the German people from the pen of a 
Catholic historian ; for what we know as German history is only 
a farce.' These words determined the young priest's vocation, 
and the ' History of the German People ' took shape in his mind. 
Before settling down to the main task of his career he wrote the 
life and collected the correspondence of Bohmer, and edited the 
reports of the Frankfurt representatives in the Diet. Bohmer 
had suggested a complete history of the German people ; but he 
decided to begin with the end of the Middle Ages. He drew 
freely on the knowledge of his friends, discussing art with Reichen- 
sperger, and other topics with Pastor and Hofler, Klopp and 
Duhr. In 1874 he read the first chapter to Pastor, who remarked, 
' That opens up a new world ' ; to which the author rejoined that 
he had the same feeling. In 1875 the first half of the first volume 
appeared, and was hailed with enthusiasm by the Catholic world. 
When he died in 1891 he had reached the eve of the Thirty 
Years War. The eight massive volumes were read with avidity, 
and translated into French and English. No Catholic historical 
work of the nineteenth century obtained such resounding success 
or led to so much discussion and controversy. 

Dollinger had shown the chaos produced by the Lutheran 
revolt ; but Protestant historians ignored his results. Janssen 
went further back, and prefaced his study of the Reformation 
by a detailed investigation of the fifteenth century. His object 
was to establish that it was not a time of moral or intellectual 
decrepitude, with a few ' Reformers before the Reformation ' 
like voices crying in the wilderness, but an era of healthy activity 
1 See Pastor, Johannes Janssen, 1894. 



CATHOLICISM 563 

and prosperity. He describes the flourishing state of religious CHAP, 
and secular education, and announces that there were not less XXVII 
than fifteen complete translations of the Bible before Luther. 
Art was vigorous and creative. The value of his work as a 
corrective of Protestant tradition was generally recognised. 
Waitz was warm in his praise, and Geiger paid a tribute to its 
scientific character. In the second half of the first volume he 
dealt with agriculture, industry and trade, showing the comfort 
of the peasants and the prosperity of the towns. For the first 
time shadows appear in the brilliant picture — riches leading to 
luxury and immorality, the despotism of capital, the horrors of 
usury. The evil was increased by Roman law, the economic 
teaching of which was contrary to Christian principles. Curiously 
enough the condition of religion is not described, Janssen excus- 
ing himself on the ground that he was not writing Church history 
and that the Lutheran revolution was rather economic, social 
and legal than ecclesiastical or intellectual. 

While the first volume found friends in both Churches, the 
second, which embraced the early years of the Reformation, was 
naturally less welcomed in Protestant circles. Unlike Dollinger, 
who traced doctrinal development, and Ranke, who related 
political history, Janssen devoted his attention chiefly to culture 
and social life. But though he avoided a detailed narrative, 
his opinions were clearly revealed. He brings a severe, almost 
savage, indictment against the Humanists. Erasmus, he declares, 
was sceptical, frivolous, selfish ; the younger Humanists were 
rather heathen than Christian, and some of them were of bad 
character. The evil genius of the time was Hutten. Of Luther 
himself he has not much to say, and he avoids invective ; but 
he paints a terrible picture of the material and moral chaos 
when the religious conflict arose. Though he does not attribute 
the Peasants' Revolt exclusively to the Reformation, he traces 
its ferocity mainly to that cause. The third volume, extending to 
the abdication of Charles V, though severe on the Protestant 
actors in the drama, is not sparing in criticism of Catholics. He 
admits the existence of evils in the Church and sharply censures 
the German bishops, describing them as secular princes with eccle- 
siastical titles. The later volumes are devoted to the Counter- 
Reformation and to the generation preceding the Thirty Years' 
War. The picture is one of unrelieved gloom — of immorality 
and drunkenness, of ignorance, tyranny and superstition. 
Hundreds of pages are devoted to popular literature, hundreds 
to the hideous crimes which disgraced the country, half a volume 
to the belief in witchcraft which infected the whole population. 



564 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. Thus the story which opened with the bright colours of the 
XXVII fifteenth century closes in deep shadow. Its message is that 
Germany was ruined not by the Thirty Years War but by the 
Reformation. 

Janssen's wide learning established a claim to confidence, and 
the novelty both of his method and results aroused universal 
interest. At last Catholics were able to boast of an historian 
who could meet Protestant scholars on equal terms. The im- 
portance of his work was emphasised by the number of attacks 
it provoked. Baumgarten, the biographer of Charles V, Kawerau 
and Kostlin, Kolde and Lenz, biographers of Luther, fell upon 
the audacious iconoclast. Delbriick declared him a false coiner, 
and denounced the work as a vast lie. Janssen replied to his 
critics in two successive volumes, in which, while accepting some 
minor corrections, he pointed out errors into which they had 
fallen. 1 Now that the dust of controversy has cleared away, 
it is not difficult to estimate the character of the book. It 
is, in the first place, a substantial addition to our knowledge 
of the life of the German people. Secondly, it has modified the 
traditional view of the fifteenth century as an age of degeneracy 
and chaos. Thirdly, it has confirmed the contention of Bollinger 
that the Lutheran movement was accompanied by indescribable 
confusion and by a decline of culture and prosperity. Taine 
truly remarked that no one could in future write of the Reforma- 
tion without knowing and weighing the Catholic side. On the 
other hand, Janssen cannot be numbered among historians of 
the first rank. He prided himself on ' letting the sources speak ' ; 
but his accumulation of all the passages that are damaging to 
Protestantism and his suppression of many of the facts that are 
damaging to Catholicism produces a very misleading result. He 
tells the truth, but it is not the whole truth. Again his use of 
materials is often uncritical. Good and bad authorities are 
lumped together, isolated particulars are often made the basis 
of far-reaching generalisations. In a word it is a dexterous 
polemic, not a work of disinterested science. 

Second in popularity among the Ultramontane historians of 
the generation following the Vatican Council is Pastor, the friend, 
biographer and editor of Janssen, and the historian of the 
Renaissance Popes. His aim was to describe the great religious 
struggle of the sixteenth century as seen in the history of the 
Papacy, as Janssen depicted it mirrored in the life of the German 
people. Neither Ranke nor Creighton had been able to use the 

1 After his death Miicke issued a rambling and violent attack, Anti- 
Janssen, 1894-9. 



CATHOLICISM 565 

Vatican archives. Drawing most of his material from this CHAP, 
inexhaustible reservoir, he supplemented it by researches in the XXVII 
archives of the Lateran, the Inquisition, the Propaganda, in the 
libraries of princely houses, in the chief cities of Italy, France 
and Germany, Austria and Switzerland. While Janssen used 
little but printed sources, Pastor prefers the testimony of manu- 
scripts. He declares that the best apologia for the Popes is to 
show what they have done ; but he is no unreserved admirer of 
certain too celebrated princes of the Church. The early volumes 
describe the period of the New Learning, the influence of which, 
he fully admits, was deeply felt in the Vatican. Keenly inter- 
ested in art and culture, he deals at length with the Humanism 
of Pius II, the artistic activities of his successors and the world- 
famous painters, sculptors and architects of the Papal Court. 
He distinguishes between the heathen and the Christian Renais- 
sance, between Valla and Poggio on the one hand and Nicholas V 
and Vittorino da Feltre on the other. The Popes, he confesses, 
welcomed all humanists without troubling about their paganism ; 
for they were themselves temporal princes, and the only vigorous 
assault on the pagan Renaissance came from Savonarola. He 
sheltered himself behind the dictum of Leo I, Petri dignitas etiam 
in indigno hcerede non deficit. He deplores the corruption and 
intrigue at papal elections. In the third volume, devoted to 
Alexander VI and Julius II, he is perhaps less indulgent than 
Creighton. Employing the Borgia Regesta for the first time, 
he declares that they render it impossible to defend the Pope. 
Yet he pronounces him the best temporal sovereign of his time, 
attributes his crimes to his affection to his family, and praises 
his zealous watch over the purity of Church teaching. He 
admits that the character of Julius was not papal, but suggests 
that it was perhaps necessary in a time of force to possess a 
militant champion of the Papacy. He blames the company 
kept by Leo X and the policy of Clement VII in Germany and 
England. He laments the absence of reforming popes at the 
crisis of the Church's fate, and makes no attempt to hide the 
faults of Paul III. 

Pastor's volumes are the result of immense industry and 
contain a mass of new material ; but he is not in the front 
rank of historians. His conception of the dual nature of the 
Renaissance is ingenious but untenable ; for the connection of 
Christian and pagan elements was so close that the era must be 
considered and judged as a whole. He is by standpoint and 
belief out of sympathy with a movement which was above all 
a revolt against the Ages of Faith. Again he never really faces 



566 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, the fact that both the conciliar movement and the German 
XXVII revolt were the expression of deep-seated and vital convictions 
He explains the shortcomings of the Popes by the worldliness 
and demoralisation of society ; but it does not occur to him 
that the corruption of the Church itself was one of its causes. 
He is severe on Savonarola, whose work he compares to the 
Salvation Army, and whom he condemns for disobeying Rome 
and mixing in politics. Instead of judging the Church more 
severely than the world for its moral lapses, he hints excuses 
and tempers blame. He sometimes appears to mistake the 
maintenance of doctrine and the regularity of festivals for the 
reality of religious life. Despite its moderate tone and super- 
ficial impartiality, the work is vitiated by fundamental bias. 
Like other Catholic historians, he fails to render the Reformation 
intelligible. A painstaking collector of facts, he is weak in 
insight and reflection. 

A far more powerful mind was the famous Dominican scholar 
Denifle, 1 whose first important writings were devoted to the 
German mystics. In opposition to Protestant tradition he 
maintained that mysticism grew out of scholasticism, and that 
the mystics were in no sense anti-clericals or forerunners of the 
Reformation. Summoned to Rome by his Order he was invited 
by Leo XIII to assist in the official edition of Aquinas. In 
pursuance of this task he visited the archives of Europe, collecting 
material not only for the enterprise but for plans of his own 
Appointed archivist at the Vatican he found such rich stores 
relating to mediaeval Universities that he undertook to write 
their history. The first volume, which appeared in 1885, was 
an apologia for the Universities and incidentally for the Church 
and the Middle Ages ; but it was also a vast compendium of 
knowledge. His scheme embraced five volumes ; but it was 
largely owing to the success of the first that it had no successor. 
The most eloquent praise came from Paris in the form of an 
invitation by the French Government to edit a documentary 
history of the University with the aid of Chatelain, the librarian 
of the Sorbonne. Denifle accepted the task, and in ten years six 
volumes of documents saw the light. The discovery of the 
originals swept away a mass of forgeries and interpolations. 
The work was also a contribution to French history, throwing 
light on the relations of the French Court and Church to the 
Papacy, on the Orders, on the reception of Aristotle and on 
mediaeval theology. While thus employed the indefatigable 
Dominican found relaxation in a work on the ' Dissolution of the 
1 See Grabmann, Heinrich Denifle, 1905. 



CATHOLICISM 567 

Church in France, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a CHAP, 
mine of curious information on art and liturgies, saints and XXVII 
relics, Church property and organisation. Like all his other 
writings, it was unfinished ; for the study of the Church in the 
fifteenth century directed his thoughts to Luther, and when 
only two volumes were completed he turned to the theme of his 
last and most celebrated publication. 

Denifle always worked with extraordinary rapidity, and the 
first volumes of his ' Luther and Lutheranism,' published in 
1904, gave evidence of profound study in the Vatican and in 
German archives. He had been compelled to write the book, 
he remarked, by the virulent attacks of Protestant historians 
on his Church and by their unreasoning idolatry of Luther. 
Protestant theologians, he declared bitterly, were allowed to 
doubt the divinity of Christ but not to lay an impious hand 
on the reformer. Luther and his friends, he affirms, lost their 
belief through moral reasons. To know Luther as he was is 
to understand his revolt. ' This book is not intended for the 
young. Such is the real Luther ! ' He concludes a preface 
of passionate conviction with the words, ' May God open the 
eyes of Protestants to his character, and bring them back to the 
Catholic Church.' The massive volume of 800 pages hurled 
at the memory of the Reformer is one of the most repulsive 
in historical literature. The Reformers, he declares, were 
apostles of the flesh ; their philosophy was summarised in the 
precept, Follow Nature. Among the most fleshly was Luther 
himself. Far from being too good for the Church, the Church 
was too good for him ; for he was dominated by a coarse, sensual 
nature. A large part of the volume is devoted to an analysis 
of his work on Monastic Vows, in which the impossibility of 
struggling against natural instincts is proclaimed with brutal 
emphasis, and the marriage of priests, in Denifle's words, is 
preached as a cure for the breach of vows. We are also informed 
that Luther drank, and a chapter on his physiognomy emphasises 
the verdict of the written evidence. 

The work fell like a bomb in the Lutheran camp. The attack 
was far more concentrated than that of Janssen, and Denifle took 
no pains to conceal his contempt for the Lutheran specialists. 
' Their original sin,' he declared, ' is that they are unscientific. 
If only they had treated Luther as they treat the God-man ! ' 
He reads them a lesson in editorial technique by pointing out a 
number of errors in the great Weimar edition of his works. This 
bitter attack brought numerous replies, notably from Harnack, 
Seeberg and Kolde. They pointed to mistakes in detail, to the 



568 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, omission of evidence which told in Luther's favour, and to neglect 
XXVII f comparison with Catholic standards. Hausrath, who pub- 
lished a life of the reformer in 1904, declared that Denifle twisted 
his phrases and took his jokes and lamentations literally. Luther 
was much fiercer in words than in deeds, and his violence was 
the only way to arouse his countrymen. He was cast in a heroic 
mould, 'God's Wundermann,' as Myconius called him, a genius 
and a child. Denifle replied in a pamphlet directed against 
Harnack and Seeberg, and then rapidly wrote a volume on pre- 
Lutheran discussions of Justification, after journeying through 
Germany, France and England in search of manuscript com- 
mentaries on St. Paul. Among his discoveries was an early 
commentary on Romans by Luther himself. It was his fate 
never to complete a work ; yet his torsos are impressive 
memorials of his vast learning and accurate scholarship. 

Many other Catholics have made noteworthy contributions 
to ecclesiastical history. Weiss, a German scholar transplanted 
to Graz, compiled a vast Weltgeschichte. Allard has investigated 
the persecutions, Funk the constitution, ritual and literature of 
the early Church. Wilpert has continued the work of De Rossi 
by an exhaustive study of the paintings in the catacombs. 
Grisar is engaged on a monumental history of Rome and the 
Papacy in the Middle Ages. Horace Mann has traced the career 
of the mediaeval Popes seriatim. Emil Michael has begun a de- 
tailed history of the German people from the end of the thirteenth 
century, destined to reach the period when Janssen begins. The 
message of the work is the high level of mediaeval society, and, 
like Janssen, he only selects evidence that supports the required 
conclusion. Ulysse Chevalier has laboured with Benedictine 
erudition at mediaeval bibliography. Gams and Eubel have 
established the succession of bishops, Finke has studied the 
councils of the fifteenth century. Noel Valois has related the 
story of the Great Schism and the Conciliar movement with 
infinite learning. 

Following the lead of Janssen and Denifle, Catholic historians 
have devoted special attention to the German Reformation. 1 
Pastor has edited a series of useful monographs, described as 
' Illustrations to Janssen's History.' The life of Luther has been 
explored in great detail by Elvers, a convert, and Grisar has 
recently devoted a learned and moderate work to his personality 
and the development of his ideas. Majunke, a journalist of the 
Kulturkampf, maintained that Luther had committed suicide, a 
legend finally exploded by Nicholas Paulus, the greatest living 

1 See Kohler, Katholicismus und Reformation, 1905. 



CATHOLICISM 569 

Catholic authority on the Reformation. Gasquet has related the CHAP, 
dissolution of the English Monasteries, and Ehses has thrown XXVII 
new light on the divorce of Catherine of Aragon from the Vatican 
archives. The defence of the Jesuits has been vigorously under- 
taken by Duhr. Choosing a few from ' the thousands of fables/ 
he deals with the poisoning of Clement XIV, ' the end justifies 
the means,' the assassination of tyrants, obscurantism, lack of 
patriotism, avarice and wealth, the responsibility for the Thirty 
Years War. Though not free from human weakness and mis- 
takes, he concludes they have nothing to fear. Hilgers has des- 
cribed and defended the Index. Hurter, the son of the convert, 
compiled a biographical dictionary of Catholic theologians. 
Briick, Bishop of Mainz, traced the fortunes of the Church in 
Germany in the nineteenth century, and Wilfrid Ward has 
described its revival in England. Associated effort has become 
common. The Gorres Society, founded in 1871, has established 
an historical review, created an Institute in Rome with an organ 
of its own, and published the colossal mass of materials relating 
to the Council of Trent. Only second in importance has been the 
activity radiating from the Jesuits of Maria-Laach. Beginning 
with occasional pamphlets after the publication of the Syllabus 
in 1864, the Stimmen aus Maria-Laach grew into a regular 
journal after the Vatican Council. From the same mint have 
come many substantial monographs and an edition of the acts 
of the modern Councils. The revised edition of the great 
encyclopaedia of Wetzer and Welte measures the advance made 
since its appearance in the middle of the century. The Belgian 
Jesuits, led by De Smedt and Delehaye, have continued the 
Vitae Sanctorum, which has now reached the month of November. 
The Benedictines possess a review of their own, the pages of which 
are enriched by the erudition of Dom Morin. Dom Cabrol, Abbot 
of Farnborough, has launched a vast ' Dictionary of Christian 
Archaeology.' The wish expressed by Leo XIII in 1897 for a 
Church history on critical lines is being carried out in the great 
co-operative work which bears the title ' Bibliotheque de 
l'enseignement de l'histoire ecclesiastique.' 



IV 

Midway between Ultramontanes and Old Catholics have stood 
a few historical scholars who, without openly revolting, were out of 
sympathy with the newer tendencies and found the yoke of the 
Papacy somewhat burdensome. Of these the most important 
are Kraus and Duchesne. 



570 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. Kraus 1 studied philology at Bonn, where he began a lifelong 
XXVII friendship with Reusch. When a little over thirty he produced a 
' Handbook of Church History ' which superseded the compendium 
of Alzog, whom he followed at Freiburg. A second edition of 
the Handbook, published in 1882, was so critical that he was 
invited by the Vatican to suppress it. He had written sharply 
of papal claims, the Jesuits and scholasticism, and declared 
bitterly that Ultramontanism had brought the Church to the edge 
of the precipice. Yielding to necessity he withdrew it and 
published an emasculated edition, saying that an officer must 
obey his general ; but he afterwards regretted his concessions and 
spoke of it as an edition de demoiselles. It was in large measure 
the desire to escape from his fetters which induced him to devote 
his later life to the less dangerous subject of Christian art. His 
survey of the monuments of Alsace-Lorraine formed a model for 
other provinces. He had met De Rossi in Rome, and he issued 
a German edition of Northcote and Brownlow's abridgment of 
the ' Roma Sotteranea,' with substantial contributions of his own. 
He next edited a ' Dictionary of Christian Antiquities,' which 
embraced not only archaeology, but the constitution, ritual and 
private life of the first six centuries. For his ' Christian In- 
scriptions of the Rhineland ' he was appointed Conservator of 
the ecclesiastical monuments of Baden. His greatest work, the 
' History of Christian Art,' began to appear in 1896. He pleads 
for the recognition of the importance of art in the interpretation 
of culture and theology, and as a genuine spiritual influence. 
Written with loving insight and superbly illustrated, it is not 
only the best survey of Christian art but a substantial contribu- 
tion to ecclesiastical history. In his sumptuous monograph on 
Dante he announces himself a Ghibelline ; for he loved papal 
domination in the Middle Ages as little as in his own day. Kraus 
was above all a humanist, an historian of culture rather than of 
the Church. He had nothing in common with post- Vatican 
Ultramontanism. His hero was Rosmini, to whom he devoted the 
longest of his essays. In his life of Cavour he sharply attacks 
the political Church and welcomes its downfall. He regarded the 
Jesuits as hopelessly obscurantist, and was the friend of Cardinal 
Hohenlohe and other priests on whom the Vatican frowned. He 
admired Harnack, and made Duchesne and Loisy known in 
Germany. His passionate desire was to reconcile Christianity 
and culture, Church and nationality, the Vatican and the Quirinal. 
But he was not a reformer of the type which goes to the stake for 

1 See Hauviller, F. X. Kraus, 1904, and Braig, Zur Erinnerung an 
F. X. Kraus, 1902, 



CATHOLICISM 571 

its convictions. He stands in somewhat the same relation to CHAP. 
Janssen and Denifle as Erasmus to Luther. While their vision XXVII 
was bounded by the Church, Kraus took all knowledge for his 
province. 

The greatest living Catholic scholar is Duchesne, whose critical 
study of the sources and editions of the ' Liber Pontificalis ' was 
rewarded by his appointment as Professor of Church History at 
the Institut Catholique at Paris. His lectures aroused the 
enthusiasm of his pupils, among whom was Loisy ; but his methods 
were too independent to be tolerated by an Ultramontane Church, 1 
and he migrated to the more temperate latitudes of the Ecole des 
Hautes Etudes. His superb edition of the ' Liber Pontificalis ' 
elicited a warm tribute from Mommsen. Of not less importance 
was his 'Episcopal Fasti of ancient Gaul,' arranged under pro- 
vinces. More popular was his study of early Christian worship, 
which reviews the origin of the Mass, the development of liturgies, 
the rites of ordination, the use of vestments, the celebration of 
festivals, and other aspects of organised Christian life. In a 
volume of lectures on the beginnings of the temporal sovereignty 
of the Popes, 754-1073, he declared that even when the grosser 
scandals had been rejected the character of almost all the Popes 
of those times was far removed from the apostolic ideal. A toler- 
ant volume on the ' Separated Churches ' added to the suspicion 
in which he was held by the stricter circles of his communion. 
In 1905 he began to publish his ' History of the Early Church,' 
based on lectures which had already been privately circulated in 
manuscript. He is a master of Protestant scholarship, and the 
names of Harnack and Schiirer, Zahn and Lipsius, Loofs and 
Kriiger appear at the foot of innumerable pages. Harnack has 
truly remarked that any Protestant scholar might be proud to 
have written the book. He recognises that at first there was 
neither canon nor creed, and that the episcopate arose as a defence 
against heresy. His pages wholly lack the unction and enthusi- 
asm that distinguish the rival narrative of Batiffol, and he skates 
lightly over thin ice. In discussing the vision of Constantine he 
remarks that it is difficult to measure the value of such testimony 
and to scrutinise such intimate events. Constantine himself is no 
hero for the historian, who finds too much blood in his story. 
The fifth century is an age of sadness, ruin and decrepitude. The 
book is written by a scholar for scholars, and no Catholic work 
of our time reaches such a lofty standard of objective treatment. 

1 For an interesting account of the conflict of influences in French 
Catholicism see Houtin, La Question biblique chez les Catholiques au 
Dix-neuvieme Steele, 1902. 



572 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. The first two volumes were published shortly before the 
XXVII condemnation of Modernism, and received the imprimatur of the 
Master of the Sacred Palace, the theologian of the Pope. They 
were hailed by the Catholic press as a proof that learning and 
orthodoxy could be combined, and the University of Louvain 
made him a Doctor. When an Italian translation was undertaken 
Duchesne made a few corrections and again obtained an imprima- 
tur. He presented a copy to Pius X, who declared himself 
satisfied with its orthodoxy. But no sooner had the translation 
appeared than a storm of criticism burst over his head. The 
Consistorial Congregation of nine Cardinals denounced it as 
' dangerous and sometimes even deadly,' and forbade its use in 
Italian Seminaries. The translation was imperfect and was at 
once withdrawn ; but the French bishops followed suit. A Jesuit, 
Bottagisio, launched a series of critical articles in a Florentine 
paper and republished them in a substantial volume, dedicated 
to the Pope. The historian replied with a ' Confidential Letter 
to the Bishops of the Catholic Church,' declaring the book a 
travesty of his views. But the hunt for modernists was now 
in full swing, and his old supporters, like Cardinal Mercier, fell 
away from him. No specific charge of heresy was made, but the 
author was accused of flippancy and lack of reverence. The 
ambition of his enemies was fulfilled in 1912, when the greatest 
work of the greatest ornament of Catholic scholarship was placed 
on the Index. 



CHAPTER XXVIII 



THE HISTORY OF CIVILISATION 



The scope of history has gradually widened till it has come CHAP, 
to include every aspect of the life of humanity. No one would XXVIII 
now dare to maintain with Seeley that history was the biography 
of States, and with Freeman that it was merely past politics. 
The growth of nations, the achievements of men of action, the rise 
and fall of parties remain among the most engrossing themes 
of the historian ; but he now casts his net wider and embraces 
the whole record of civilisation. The influence of nature, the 
pressure of economic factors, the origin and transformation of 
ideas, the contribution of science and art, religion and philosophy, 
literature and law, the material conditions of life, the fortunes 
of the masses — such problems now claim his attention in no 
less degree. He must see life steadily and see it whole. 



The literary genre which embraces the non-political aspects 
of civilisation is most conveniently termed Kulturgeschichte, 1 
and its founder was Voltaire. His ' Siecle de Louis XIV ' was 
the first work in which the whole life of a nation is portrayed. 
In like manner his ' Essai sur les Mceurs ' is the first real history 
of civilisation, the first work in which an attempt is made to 
weave the numberless threads into a single design. Where 
Voltaire opened the way, other historians followed. Winckel- 
mann treated the history of ancient art as a revelation of the 
Greek mind. Heeren explored the development of commerce. 
Justus Moser discovered the peasant, and exhibited the con- 
nection between economic and political organisation. Herder 
and the Romantics listened for the whisperings of the Folk-soul. 

1 See Jodl, Die Culturgeschichtschreibung, 1878, and Schaumkell, 
Gcschichte der deutschen Kulturgeschichtschreibung, 1905. 



574 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. The histories of Schlosser and Guizot march on a broad front. 

XXVIII Yet the full importance of Kulturgeschichte was rarely recognised 
during the first half of the nineteenth century, and the surveys 
of civilisation essayed by Wachsmuth and Kolb were little more 
than an aggregation of unrelated details. 

It is a commonplace that the revolution of 1848 directed 
the attention of statesmen and historians to the Fourth Estate 
as that of 1789 to the Tiers Etat. It was this great event which 
in the main determined the life-work of Riehl, 1 a member of 
the Triumvirate to which historians of culture look back as the 
pioneers and models of their craft. Lorenz selects Riehl as 
the chief representative of the genre, while Steinhausen claims 
the place for Burckhardt and Gustav Freytag. It is true that 
Riehl never produced a classic ; but he devoted a long life as 
Professor, author and itinerant lecturer to preaching the im- 
portance of historical sociology, and he may be regarded as the 
godparent of the innumerable works on the life of the people 
which have appeared in the last half-century. His father was 
Superintendent of the Castles of the Duke of Nassau, and took 
his son with him on his journeys of inspection. The lectures 
of Kugler and Vischer taught him to love art, while Arndt and 
Dahlmann stimulated his interest in history. The romantic 
movement, with its enthusiasm for the creative capacity of the 
people, and the rapid development of Germanistic studies under 
the inspiration of Jacob Grimm combined to mould the thought 
of the young Rhinelander. A residence in Augsburg strength- 
ened his interest in the burgher life of old Germany. In 1854, 
at the age of thirty-one, he was summoned to Munich by the 
scholar-king Maximilian II, and became an honoured guest at 
his Round Table. His lectures attracted large and enthusiastic 
audiences. Acton attended his classes and recorded his im- 
pressions long after. ' One man living has an equal grasp of the 
moving and abiding forces of society. Over thirty years ago, 
before Burckhardt or Friedlander, Buckle or Symonds, Riehl 
began to lecture on the history of civilisation, revealing to his 
fortunate audience new views of history, deeper than any existing 
in literature.' 

Folk-study, he declared, was an independent science, the 
unfinished creation of the last century ; but the materials, though 
not the idea, were as old as history. Homer and the Old Testa- 
ment were rich in ore, and Herodotus, who had a clear conception 

1 See Simonsfeld, W. H. Riehl, 1898 ; Gothein, in Preussische 
Jahrbiicher, April .1898; Lorenz, Die Geschichtswissenschaft, 1886, There 
is much autobiographical material in Riehl' 3 writings. 



HISTORY OF CIVILISATION 575 

of ethnography, was the father of folk-study as well as of history. CHAP. 
Tacitus first systematically related the people to the country XXVIII 
in his ' Germania.' Not till Justus Moser, the true founder of 
social history, was a further step taken. The ' History of Osna- 
briick ' was the first work in which the mass of the people came 
by their rights. The next half-century witnessed contributions 
to an historical sociology from various sources — the creation of 
a science of statistics by Achenwall, Adam Smith's studies of 
economic life, Karl Ritter's emphasis on geography, Savigny's 
natural history of law, above all the mythological and philo- 
logical works of the Grimms. It was now recognised that man 
could only develop within the limits imposed by nature. It 
was on these foundations that his chief work, the ' Natural 
History of the German People,' rested. In the preface to the 
first volume, ' Land and People,' he explains that he has learned 
from his wanderings over the country that types and characters 
have a definite historical and natural origin. The people, once 
merely a decorative background, are now the chief figure in the 
picture, and the main task alike of the historian and the poli- 
tician is to understand the laws of their growth. Of these the 
most fundamental is nature. He divides Germany into three 
districts, the differences of climate, soil, mountain or plain 
leading to different customs, use of the land, food, clothing, houses 
and even beliefs. While towns quickly become cosmopolitan 
the life of the country flows on, determined less by the action 
of governments or the infiltration of ideas than by the influence 
of natural factors. The analysis of the action of nature on 
social and economic life is highly suggestive, and there is a 
penetrating sense of the open air in his pages. 

Having laid the foundation of his historical sociology in a 
study of natural conditions, he proceeds in a second volume to 
formulate the laws of society. There are two great forces in 
social life, each incorporated in two classes. The first, that 
of inertia or social conservatism, is most powerfully represented 
by the peasant ; but it is a democratic conservatism. During 
the French Revolution, when the towns seethed with excitement 
over the rights of man, the peasants asked for privileges in wood 
and meadow. The second class representing persistence or 
inertia is the aristocracy. Stein wisely recognised that to 
remove its oppressive privileges was to strengthen and perpetuate 
its social and political influence. The second of the fundamental 
forces is that of movement, which operates primarily in the 
towns. On the maintenance of equilibrium between the forces 
of persistence and movement depend the health and well-being 



576 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, of the State. Pursuing his way from the general to the particular, 
XXVIII Ri e hi deals in a third volume with ' The Family,' the sheet-anchor 
of society. ' The more we change in the State and society,' 
he declares, 'the more we cling to the family.' The family 
rests on nature's division of labour between the sexes ; and the 
growth of culture differentiates them still further, since in 
primitive communities the women work like the men. He calls 
attention to the factors, traditional and otherwise, which give a 
character to each separate household. This family individuality, 
which speaks from the pictures of Ludwig Richter, he adjures 
his countrymen to retain. He calls his volume ' The Idyll of 
the German Home,' and declares it to be written for the drawing- 
room as well as for the study. 

The volume on the Palatinate is a detailed example of the 
methods recommended in the 'Natural History,' and was 
intended as a contribution to group psychology. The natural 
features of the country, the history of the people, the monuments 
of the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, the villages and 
towns, clothes and food, political and social characteristics, 
religion and dialect, are passed in review. Riehl essayed a 
similar task in his exploration of Augsburg, undertaken likewise 
at the instigation of the King, which has been sometimes 
described as his masterpiece. ' In folk study, as in natural 
science,' he declared, ' there are no small matters.' Everywhere 
he finds an organic relation between nature and man. His 
methods were applied in a great co-operative work on the ' Land 
and People of Bavaria,' edited by himself at the command of the 
King, and in the foundation of a National Museum at Munich, 
of which he was the first director. An essential part of his 
work for Kulturgeschichte was his emphasis on art. Himself 
a musician and a musical critic he contended that music was 
as great a factor in culture as poetry or science, and that the 
evolution of musical forms solved many a problem in the history 
of German sentiment. Again, the cathedrals and other monu- 
ments of the past formed an illustrated history of the land and 
the people. In addition to his historical works he wrote a large 
number of stories, designed to survey a thousand years of 
German life. ' Each is only a little genre picture, but together 
they make a great historical panorama.' He created figures on 
an historical background of scene and costume, atmosphere and 
ideas, often making use of oral traditions, which he regarded as 
among the finest material for the history of the folk-soul. 
Though not organically connected and less directly historical 
than Freytag's creations, his tales, especially those of the recent 



HISTORY OF CIVILISATION 577 

centuries which he knew best, were of real value in rendering the CHAP, 
ideas and atmosphere of the past intelligible. XXVIII 

Riehl's keen insight into the connection of nature and man 
was not accompanied by the recognition of the importance 
of other factors. His relative indifference to the State led 
Treitschke to dismiss him as a publicist of the salon. Like 
Jacob Grimm, he preferred the type to the individual. He was 
not a man of great erudition. He looked first to the living 
people and only then to the printed word. He knew little of the 
Middle Ages. He was the most unprofessional of historians. 
His achievement was to emphasise the inexhaustible interest of 
the life of the people, and to inquire by what influences that life 
was determined and through what channels it expressed itself. 
Gothein testifies to the delight with which his contemporaries 
welcomed the pictures of Riehl, and how they set out on walking 
tours of observation and discovery. He found interest and 
meaning in the dullest districts and people, and turned dust to 
gold. He was sometimes described by liberal critics as the 
theorist of the reaction after 1848 ; but it was the gentle, poetic 
conservatism which loved the ' good old times.' He advanced 
the highest claims for Kuliurgeschichte, describing it as the true 
philosophy of history. He refused to recognise an antagonism 
between Politics and Culture. ' The dualism will vanish, and 
Kuliurgeschichte will become the stem, with the State, the 
Church, Art and other departments as branches.' 

As intensely German as Riehl, Gustav Freytag 1 won a far 
wider popularity in his attempt to reconstruct the historic life 
of the German people. A native of Silesia, where the proximity 
of the Slavonic world intensified racial self-consciousness, he 
early developed an absorbing interest in German literature and 
history. Initiated into mediaeval philology by Lachmann, he 
took his Doctor's degree with a thesis on the origin of German 
dramatic poetry, following it up with a study of Roswitha. These 
early explorations of the old festival-plays, the mysteries, the 
comedies, half pagan and half Christian, revealed to him the life 
and voice of the people. The events of 1848 drove him into 
the forum. He bought the Grenzboten, moved to Leipsic, 
and made it the organ of German unification under Prussian 
hegemony. Henceforth he combined politics with history. It 
was in the columns of his own paper that his ' Scenes from 
German History ' began to appear in 1852. ' The life of the 

1 See Freytag, Erinnerungen, 1887 ; Alberti, Gustav Freytag, 1885 ; 
Hanstein, G. F., 1895 ; Lindau, G. F., 1907 ; Dove, Ausgewdhlte 
Schriftchen ; Freytag, u. Treitschke im Brief wecJisel, 1900. 

2 p 



578 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, people,' he wrote long after in his autobiography, ' which flows 
XXVIII i n a dark current beneath political events, had always greatly 
attracted me — the circumstances, sorrows and joys of millions 
of humble men and women.' He collected innumerable pam- 
phlets, fly-sheets, woodcuts and other treasures. ' To these little 
books I owe all sorts of knowledge of customs and modes of life 
of which the longer works say nothing.' Beginning with sketches 
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was only later, 
and owing to their warm welcome, that he determined to cover 
the whole of German history. 

Frey tag's ' Bilder,' surveying the life of the German people 
from beginning to end in five volumes, though not the work of a 
professional historian, rank high in importance. Based to some 
extent, especially in the later volumes, on original research, they 
were praised by scholars as highly as by the great public. They 
are a work at once of patriotism, of science and of art. ' It is 
the best German history that we have,' pronounced Scherer, ' or, 
if that is too much to say, we find in it more that we demand 
from a good German history than anywhere else.' Erich Schmidt 
places him in the first flight of Germanists and historians. These 
high compliments were well deserved, and even to-day the book 
is without a rival. His hope that it might become ' a friend of 
the home ' has been amply realised. By setting the people in 
the foreground of the picture he gives unity to a span of two 
thousand years, and by his extracts from contemporary witnesses 
he brings the past within sight. ' You put a piece of your heart 
into everything that your pen touches,' remarked Treitschke. 
' After Jacob Grimm,' wrote Scherer, ' no one has filled me with 
such love for our people as you.' Yet he resists the temptation 
to idealise the past. It is in vain, he declares, that the German 
seeks for the good old times. In every period of the past life 
was harder and poorer than it is to-day. There was little safety, 
few rights, no public opinion. Above all, the individual soul was 
less free. Freytag avoids the danger of forgetting the individual 
in the mass. He once spoke of Kulturgeschichte as being too 
often like an old clo' shop — garments with no one to wear them. 
He fully realises the importance of dominant personalities. He 
reaches the first impressive figure in Charles the Great. A little 
later Barbarossa, ' the last real German Emperor,' is portrayed 
with loving care. The centre of the whole work is Luther ; 
and the sketch of the Reformer became the cherished possession 
of Protestant Germany, as Michelet's picture of Joan of Arc 
carried a breath of patriotic idealism into the schools of France. 
Only second in importance is the detailed study of the work 



HISTORY OF CIVILISATION 579 

and character of Frederick the Great. If these portraits are CHAP, 
the most popular part of the book, its most valuable feature is XXVIII 
the picture of the Thirty Years War. He portrays the army, 
camp life, the villages, the towns, the superstitions and vices, 
the robbers and the police. No historian has so impressively 
revealed the moral and material disasters of a struggle that threw 
back Germany for a century. 

The book was completed in 1866, when Germany came within 
sight of unification. ' This year,' wrote Freytag, ' Germans have 
regained what to many had become as unfamiliar as the Volker- 
wanderung or the Crusades — their State. It has become a joy 
to be German, and it will soon be reckoned a great honour among 
the nations of the earth.' A life of his friend Mathy, the Baden 
Minister and one of the champions of German unity, may be 
regarded as a continuation of the story in another form. But 
his work as the interpreter of the life of the German people was 
not completed. In his autobiography he relates how the cam- 
paign of 1870, in which he accompanied the Crown Prince, gave 
rise to visions which were to take shape in ' The Ancestors. ' 
The whole history of the race seemed to unroll like a map before 
his eyes. ' I was always deeply interested in the connection 
of man with his ancestors,' he writes, ' in their mysterious 
influence on body and soul. What science cannot fathom the 
poet may attempt.' He formed a plan by which a single family 
should take part in the decisive events of German history. The 
novels of Willibald Alexis had dealt with Brandenburg and 
Prussia, but presented little interest to the members of other 
States. Freytag determined to appeal to every citizen of united 
Germany. The first story, appearing in 1872, related the fortunes 
of Ingo at the time of the Roman peril ; the second dealt with the 
Slav invasion in the East and the coming of Boniface. The third 
and fourth depicted the rise and fall of chivalry. The fifth, 'Marcus 
Konig,' brings us to the Reformation, mirrored in the career of 
a merchant of Thorn, living under Polish rule but German in 
feeling. The sixth portrays the Thirty Years War, the seventh 
the reign of Frederick William I. The last of the series embraces 
the Wars of Liberation and incorporates matter relating to his 
own family. The latest member of the family, Victor Konig, 
becomes a journalist in 1848. Freytag described his work as a 
symphony in eight parts. But while the individual is presented 
as the heir of the ages, he is never limited or fettered by the 
lengthening chain of tradition. The ancestors are an inspiration, 
not a burden. Though the pearls are strung on an almost 
invisible thread, the series possesses a unity which Riehl's 



580 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, sketches lack. Read with avidity during the years succeeding 
XXVIII the crowning mercy of 1870, ' Die Ahnen ' brought vividly before 
united Germany the memories of the past. The book took its 
place as a poetical rendering of the ' Bilder,' as the Wallenstein 
dramas grew out of the ' Thirty Years War. ' Together they have 
done more to interest German men and women all over the world 
in their own history than the writings of any other man. 

While Riehl and Freytag devoted their strength to the 
fortunes of the German people, their greater contemporary, 
Burckhardt, 1 called attention rather to the life of the mind. 
His theme was thought and conduct, religion and art, scholarship 
and speculation — the reconstruction of the mental and moral 
atmosphere of the past. As Riehl loved the peasant, Burckhardt 
loved the elite. Both contributed to widen the scope of history ; 
but while Riehl wrote only of his own country and is little known 
beyond it, Burckhardt's vision swept the whole field of civilisa- 
tion and his fame is in every land. After studying theology 
at Basel, his native town, he soon exchanged it for history. At 
Berlin he heard Bockh, Jacob Grimm and Ranke ; but he was 
most attracted by Franz Kugler, whose ' History of Art ' was 
then beginning to appear. He had already, as a young man of 
twenty, written on Swiss Cathedrals, and on entering at Bonn 
he wrote on the Churches of the Rhine. In 1844 he was appointed 
lecturer on history and art at Basel, and began to attract the 
crowd of eager listeners which was to throng his lecture-room 
for half a century. In 1847, at the request of the author, he 
edited Kugler 's ' Handbook of Painting,' adding a good deal of 
material of his own. 

Though his labours had been hitherto chiefly in the world 
of art, Burckhardt's first considerable work showed that he was 
keenly alive to other aspects of civilisation. ' For me/ he wrote 
in 1842, ' the background is the chief consideration, and that 
is provided by Kullurgeschichte, to which I intend to dedicate 
myself.' His ' Times of Constantine the Great,' published in 
1852, aimed at seizing the features of a period of rapid transition. 
In studying the fourth century for his lectures, he had been 
struck by the prevailing ignorance of the atmosphere. He 
desired to depict the psychology of an age in which the leading 
characteristic was insecurity and the dominant tendency was a 
longing for novelty. The old and the new were concentrated 
in Diocletian and Constantine. He reviews the elements which 

1 See Trog, Jakob Burckhardt, 1898 ; Neumann in Allg. Deutsche 
Biog. ; Gelzer, Ausgewdhlte Kleine Schriften, 1907 ; Gothein in Preussische 
Jahrbilcher, vol. xc. 



HISTORY OF CIVILISATION 581 

rotted and fermented in the old world and prepared the way CHAP, 
for Christianity ; but he regards Constantine himself as a XXVIII 
calculating realist, motived by purely secular ambitions. To 
those who contended that Constantine's religious convictions were 
a mystery he rejoins that he had none. Moreover Christianity 
itself rapidly degenerated when it became the official religion, 
and the better elements took refuge in asceticism and monasticism. 
The book is a panoramic survey of the outer and inner life of 
the Empire and its government, the provinces and the capitals, 
heathenism, neo-platonism and the mysteries, the persecution 
of the Christians, the relation of Church and State. The old 
world, he concludes, was destroyed neither by the barbarians 
nor by Christianity, but by itself. The work was welcomed by 
scholars, and it led Gelzer to the serious study of Byzantine 
history. But though it brought him at a bound into the front 
rank of historians it never became a popular favourite. 

Burckhardt's first great passion was art. He had already 
paid a flying visit to Italy, and after finishing the ' Constantine ' 
he spent over a year in the peninsula. The result was his 
' Cicerone,' or guide to the art treasures of Italy, a book in small 
format of a thousand pages, divided into sections on architec- 
ture, sculpture and painting. The work won warm praise from 
Kugler and other historians of art ; but as a pilgrimage to 
Italy was then expensive, it sold little for many years. In later 
editions, revised by other hands, it was to become the guide, 
philosopher and friend to innumerable travellers. Though his 
earlier architectural works had been devoted to Gothic, he 
warmly appreciates Renaissance, emphasising its originality in 
the treatment of space. He is less at home in sculpture, but is 
stimulating in his judgments on painting. Throughout the 
book he offers his own impressions, regardless of tradition or 
expert opinion. After studying the art of the Renaissance he 
turned to the exploration of other aspects of its life. He de- 
termined to submit Italy to the same searching analysis as he 
had devoted to the age of Constantine. The new subject suited 
him better than the old. He had too little sympathy with Chris- 
tianity to understand certain aspects of the fourth century ; 
but in the fifteenth, with its intellectual audacity, its art and 
scholarship, he was thoroughly at home. His ' Culture of the 
Renaissance,' published in i860, immediately took its place 
among historical classics, revealing to the world the potentialities 
of Kulturgeschichte, and raising it in a moment to a position of 
authority among historical genres. No historian has seized and 
interpreted the psychology of an epoch with such power and 



582 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

insight. In the Middle Ages, declares the historian, one was 
a member of a class, a corporation, a family ; society was a 
hierarchy, tradition was supreme. With the Renaissance man 
discovered himself and became a spiritual individual. The 
fetters of a thousand years were burst, self-realisation became 
the goal, and new valuations of the world and of man became 
current. Dazzling personalities of the type of the Emperor 
Frederick II had been witnessed but once or twice in the Middle 
Ages. The complete man, I'uomo universale, now became common 
in the world of action, of thought and of art. ' The fifteenth 
century is, above all, that of the many-sided man.' The soil 
from which these wonderful human plants grew was composed 
of many elements — the intense life of the City State, the 
revival of the art and philosophy of antiquity, the weakening 
of authority, the disintegration of belief. The Tyrant and the 
Condottiere, despite their ruthlessness, were political artists, 
men cast in a gigantic mould. The great ladies developed a 
brilliancy never attained by women before or since. 

Burckhardt was far too great an historian to be blinded by 
the brilliance which flashes out between the Middle Ages and the 
Reformation. The detailed analysis of morality and religion with 
which the book closes makes no attempt to hide the savagery 
and bestiality, the gross superstition existing side by side with 
limitless scepticism, by which the age was disfigured. He is 
appalled by ' the disinterested love of evil ' in Caesar Borgia and 
Sigismondo Malatesta. Yet he realises that the fundamental vice 
of the character of the upper classes, unbridled individualism, 
was at the same time a condition of its greatness. ' The Italian 
of the Renaissance had to bear the first mighty surging of a new 
age. Through his gifts and his passions he has become the 
most characteristic representative of all the heights and all the 
depths of his time.' With all its glaring faults, the Renaissance 
was the spring-time of the modern world. Burckhardt's master- 
piece is one of the most original works in historical literature. 
Many readers have complained of the omission of art ; and 
though Taine has replied that we do not miss it, because we are 
more interested in the man as a man than as an artist, it renders 
the survey of civilisation incomplete. Others maintain that 
he exaggerates the rapidity of the transition from mediaeval 
twilight to the blinding illumination of the Renaissance. His 
knowledge of the literary sources of the Renaissance was immense, 
but he had made no very profound study of the Middle Ages. 
Some critics have asserted that the view of the Renaissance is 
too flattering, others that the political chapters are inadequate. 



HISTORY OF CIVILISATION 583 

The most severe of recent judges complains that he fails to CHAP, 
explain how the Renaissance originated or developed, that he XXVIII 
omits the material foundation of Italian culture, and that his 
survey of writers confounds different generations. But these 
criticisms, few of which are wholly without substance, leave the 
reputation of the book intact as the most brilliant and suggestive 
picture of the Renaissance ever painted, ' the most penetrating 
and subtle treatise on the history of civilisation that exists in 
literature.' 1 

Though he lived nearly forty years longer, Burckhardt never 
published another book. He devoted infinite pains to his 
lectures, to the astonishing wealth and originality of which 
Nietzsche and other hearers have borne witness. He refused 
the flattering offer of Ranke's Chair at Berlin when the veteran 
historian retired. The chief occupation of his later life was an 
encyclopaedic survey of Greek civilisation, based on his lectures. 2 
Two volumes had been ready for many years at the time of his 
death in 1897, and two further volumes were prepared for the 
press by a pupil. He had sketched a course in 1868 on the 
Spirit of Antiquity, and had often lectured on Greece during 
the following years. Under pressure from his hearers he reduced 
them to writing ; but he could never conquer the conviction 
that they were too imperfect for publication, and he only gave 
permission on his death-bed. When urged by Gelzer he replied 
ironically, ' No — such a poor outsider dare not. I am a heretic 
and an ignoramus, and I should be torn in pieces by the viri 
emditissimi.' These facts must be remembered if we are to 
understand the imperfections of the book and the sharp criticisms 
which it provoked from specialists. While the manuscript was 
lying in his desk Greek studies were making rapid progress. The 
Professor knew that he was being left behind ; but he believed that 
a thorough knowledge of the literary sources was a guarantee 
against serious error. He never realised the importance of the 
inscriptions and other new evidence as an addition to and 
corrective of the literary material. 

The ' History of Greek Civilisation ' is a detailed and com- 
prehensive survey. ' The highest culture,' he declared, ' can 
only arise on ground made safe by might.' Yet he does not 
bind culture to politics, and he recognises the sovereignty of 
genius. In particular, art may flourish when the State is weak. 

1 Acton. 

- The best discussion of the book is by Carl Neumann, ' Griechische 
Kulturgeschichte in der Auffassung Burckhardts,' Hist. Zeitschrift, vol. 
lxxxv. 



584 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. To religion he devotes an entire volume. The third volume deals 
XXVIII with art and literature, science and philosophy, while the fourth 
portrays the individual Greek in the successive stages of his 
development from Homer to Pausanias. He utterly rejects the 
idealisation of the Greek world which Curtius had inherited from 
Otfried Miiller, Goethe and Winckelmann. The very fact that 
he was not a specialist, that he came to Greece late in life with 
an eye trained in other fields, gives his book unusual freshness. 
The most striking feature of the picture is the depth of the 
shadows. He had been accused of being dazzled by the Renais- 
sance. He was certainly not dazzled by Greece. He empha- 
sises the cruelties, the intolerance, the dark stain of slavery. 
Though he was sometimes called ' the pagan,' he yielded to none 
in his acceptance of Christian morals. Though Wilamowitz 
declared categorically that it did not exist for science, such 
good judges as Holm and Karst have spoken highly of the work. 
For Burckhardt the inner life was more interesting and more 
important than the outer world of forms and institutions, which, 
indeed, he valued chiefly as supplying favourable conditions for 
its expression. It was his power of penetrating to the soul of 
an epoch and reading its riddle that aroused the enthusiasm 
of Taine. He was so individual that he never formed a school ; 
but where is the historian who has set out to interpret the 
psychology of an age or a people who has not drunk deeply at his 
spring ? 

II 

When Riehl, Freytag and Burckhardt rendered Kulturge- 
schichte fashionable, other workers appeared to carry their 
methods into new territory. Wilhelm Arnold, a favourite pupil 
alike of Jacob Grimm and Ranke, emphasised the place of law 
and economics in the development of society. Friedlander's 
incomparable picture of the civilisation of the Roman Empire 
appeared in 1861, and was quickly followed by Lecky's histories 
of Rationalism and Morals. Such works as Gregorovius' ' City 
of Rome in the Middle Ages,' Symonds' ' Renaissance in Italy,' 
and Professor Dill's volumes on Roman Society have enriched 
the conception of history. Precious contributions to the 
story of intellectual development have been made by Roscher 
and Gierke, Leslie Stephen and Lord Morley, Haym and Justi, 
Georg Brandes and Kuno Fischer. The introduction of the 
historic method into the study of economics directed attention 
to social history. Hallam had lamented that we could never 



HISTORY OF CIVILISATION 585 

know the life of an English mediaeval village ; but Thorold Rogers' CHAP, 
researches laid the foundation of a history of rural England, and XXVIII 
Cunningham wrote the first comprehensive survey of our econo- 
mic development. Levasseur devoted a long life to tracing the 
fortunes of the French working-classes. Nitzsch lectured at 
Berlin on the social history of the German people, and Inama- 
Sternegg wrote the first scholarly economic history of Germany. 
Kovalevsky has traced the problem of property from the fall 
of the Roman Empire. The school of Schm oiler, whose own 
early study of the cloth industry at Strassburg served as a model, 
has illuminated every country with monographs of the highest 
importance. No one has so powerfully emphasised the intimate 
connection of economic phenomena with the life of the State and 
society as the venerable Berlin professor. 

The history of civilisation was eagerly studied by a group of 
men who wrote under the influence of the scientific discoveries 
and generalisations of the middle of the nineteenth century. 
Comte's limited knowledge of history discounts the value of his 
survey of development, and his law of the three states was neither 
original nor true. Buckle's l torso was of greater service in stimu- 
lating reflection on the causes and connections of events and in 
emphasising the enduring influence of natural conditions ; while 
his brilliant sketches of intellectual development in England and 
Scotland, France and Spain, are among the most fascinating 
pages in historical literature. It was his ambition to trans- 
form the history of civilisation from a compilation into something 
like an exact science, resting on a solid basis of comparison and 
induction from the whole boundless field of politics and culture. 
His thesis that progress was the result of growing knowledge 
was sharply challenged ; but though he shares the confident 
dogmatism of his age, his book has marked an epoch in the life 
of readers all over the world and gave an immense impetus to the 
sociological investigation of the past. It was as a champion 
of similar naturalistic ideas that Hellwald,2 the well-known 
traveller and geographer, compiled his ' History of Civilisation 
in its Natural Development ' in 1874. ' I try,' he wrote, ' to 
examine if supernatural forces are necessary to explain the 
phenomena of civilisation.' He concluded that they were not, 
and pronounced cultural development a natural process, con- 
ditioned by race, geography and climate. Civilisation means the 
mastering of nature and the taming of man, not the growth of 

1 See J. M. Robertson's remarkable work, Buckle and his Critics, 1895. 

2 See Allg. Deutsche Biog. The naturalistic school is discussed by 
Barth, Die Philosophie der Geschichte als Soziologie, 1897. 



586 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, morality. The struggle for existence dominates the whole course 
XXVIII of historic life. The best part of the book is that which deals 
with savage and prehistoric man, where nature rules as an 
autocrat, not as a constitutional monarch. Though Hellwald's 
knowledge of world-history was limited, his tone polemical, his 
philosophy shallow, the book won wide popularity. The fourth 
edition, published after his death, was revised by specialists 
and superbly illustrated. His standpoint is shared, though less 
aggressively displayed, by Henne-am-Rhyn, the erudite archivist 
of St. Gall, who devoted forty years to the civilisation of his 
own country, of Germany and of the world. Helmolt has edited 
a great co-operative ' History of Mankind ' which emphasises 
the sovereign influences of nature and geography. Primitive 
civilisation has been brought within the circle of historical study. 
The discoveries of Boucher des Perthes, Pitt-Rivers and their 
successors have thrown back the opening of the human drama 
thousands of years. In the hands of Tylor and McLennan, 
Mannhardt and Theodor Waitz, Ratzel and Bastian, Frazer and 
Westermarck, anthropology has become a science, and the habits 
and beliefs of our ancestors have been rendered intelligible. Maine 
devoted his massive intellect to the interpretation of early law. 

The most ambitious work ever consecrated to the develop- 
ment of humanity by a single writer is that of.LaiMsnLLJtfrs— 
representative of a widely different school, whose chief work 
began to appear in 1850. The Ghent Professor surveys the whole 
history of mankind, presenting in each volume tableaux of politics 
and culture respectively. Special attention is paid to religion 
and to men and events which aided or retarded humanity in its 
advance towards freedom and justice. The work is impressive, 
not only for its broad perspectives, but for its earnestness and 
suggestiveness. A final volume, entitled ' The Philosophy of 
History,' summarises the work and extracts its lessons. Laurent 
believes as firmly as Bossuet that history is a theodicy. He 
tries to seize the significance of changes and movements in the 
plan of Providence, and seeks evidence of man's increasing 
apprehension of the Divine plan. 

The increasing popularity of Kullurgeschichte has given rise 
to prolonged controversy as to its character and importance. 
The discussions which aroused the widest interest were those 
between Gothein and Schafer and those which arose out of 
Lamprecht's ' German History.' In his inaugural lecture at 
Tubingen in 1888 Dietrich Schafer, 2 known for his studies of the 

1 See Flint, The Philosophy of History, 680-690, 1893. 

2 Das eigentliche Arbeitsgebiet der Geschichte. 



HISTORY OF CIVILISATION 587 

Hanseatic League, declared that if history was to have unity and CHAP, 
scientific character it must concentrate on the State. In our demo- XXVIII 
cratic age many writers found the pivot of development in the 
masses, and studied rather their habits and circumstances than 
the expressions of the highest nature of man. Large volumes 
were, devoted to such trifles as the mediaeval house. It was time 
to reassert that the vitalising breath, without which history was 
a mass of dead knowledge, must always come from the State. 
Even the Renaissance was largely political, and its typical figure 
was Machiavelli. The Reformation gave man a national con- 
sciousness, and Luther proclaimed the divine origin of the State. 
' The historian's task is to make the State understand its origin, 
its task, the conditions of its life.' If he enters the region of 
religion or law, literature or art, he must remember that he is 
walking along side-paths. 

This uncompromising assertion of the traditional political 
standpoint called forth a reply from the ablest of the younger 
German practitioners of Kulturgeschichte. 1 Gothein had attracted 
attention by a study of the civilisation of Southern Italy, which 
he had traversed on foot as Riehl had traversed the Palatinate, 
and increased his fame by a massive study of Loyola and the 
Counter-Reformation. Growing sciences, he declared, needed 
no anxious limitation of their scope. The State was only one 
form of human association. It might, perhaps, be the greatest ; 
but all were indispensable. The separate aspects of historic 
life — the State, religion, art, law, economics — involve and pre- 
suppose a higher unity in which they combine, an organism of 
which they are limbs. Schafer had spoken as if Kulturgeschichte 
dealt only with the material conditions of life. He rebuts the 
assertion that it neglects the individual by declaring that Freytag 
comes nearest the great secret of the connection of the single life 
with the folk-life, and that his Luther and Frederick tower like 
oaks in the underwood. To the criticism that it dwarfs the State 
he replies that in many of the critical moments of human develop- 
ment the key is to be found beyond the boundaries of politics. 
In the era of Constantine the cardinal event was the inner transi- 
tion from paganism to Christianity. In the Renaissance, the 
Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, ideas shattered the 
ancient moulds and transformed the face of the world. In such 
periods only the historian of culture is in a position to bring order 
out of the chaos of politics. The growth of Prussia was essentially 
a political problem ; but such exceptions are rare. Events are 
the products of forces, and forces are the children of ideas. 
1 Die Aufgaben der Kulturgeschichte, 1889. 



588 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP. A reply from Schafer * brought the controversy to a close. He ad- 
XXVIII m its that history denotes and includes all aspects of life ; but he 
pleads that no human mind can embrace the whole, and maintains 
that Ranke and all other great historians focussed their glance on 
the State. He challenges the contention that certain periods are 
almost wholly cultural. Luther, he declares, would never have 
succeeded without national feeling behind him. The Counter- 
Reformation would never have won its sensational successes 
without the treasure of Mexico and Peru . Neither controversialist 
convinced the other, and each continued to work at the subjects 
which interested him most. Gothein's brilliant plea for a wider 
conception of the historian's task made a profound impression, 
and proved useful not only in broadening the political school, but 
in recalling champions of Kultiirgeschichte to the graver obligations 
of their apostolate. 

The controversy arising out of the publication of Lamprecht's 
' German History ' 3 was far more bitter and prolonged. Lamprecht 
won reputation by a massive monograph on mediaeval economic 
life on the Mosel and the middle Rhine. The industry in bringing 
together the greatest collection of original material ever made 
for a German district was generally recognised ; but the use 
of his treasures was sharply criticised. Below pronounced his 
methods arbitrary and his constructions capricious. Gierke com- 
plained that his juristic conceptions lacked clearness. Schmoller 
declared that the book was published too soon, and was 
cloudy in thought and difficult to read. In 1891 the ' German 
History ' began to appear. No preface explained the purpose of 
the author ; but a few introductory sentences were added to the 
second edition of the first volume published three years later. 
The purely political historian, he declares, inquires with Ranke 
' how it happened ' — wie ist es eigentlich gewesen ? He desired to 
know ' how it became ' — wie ist es eigentlich geworden ? The 
genetic must be substituted for the narrative method, involving 
a survey of the whole mass of circumstances, material and in- 
tellectual, out of which events grow. Living in a scientific age 
the historian must investigate causation. In the political parts 
of the work he made no claim to original research ; but the surveys 
of social organisation and the review of culture were wholly his 
own. The main object of the book was to trace the development 

1 Geschichte und Kulturgeschichte, 1891. 
The literature on Lamprecht is enormous. There is a useful sketch 
of the controversy in Goldfriedrich, Die historische Ideenlehre in Deutsch- 
land, 431-65, 1902. Cp. Bernheim, Lehrbuch der historischen Methode, 
710-18, 1908. 



HISTORY OF CIVILISATION 589 

of the German consciousness. He believed in a national folk- CHAP, 
soul, which developed according to immanent laws, though XXVIII 
affected by outside influences. 

Beginning with Pytheas, he sketches the natural differences 
between his time and our own. Anthropology and philology 
are laid under contribution ; but his picture of primitive German 
life compares unfavourably with the lucidity of such a master as 
Wilhelm Arnold. The political narrative, which begins with 
Caesar and Varus, is weak and colourless, while every form of 
art is lovingly reviewed. Charles the Great is the first concrete 
human being we meet, but he does not enjoy a very vigorous 
vitality. The history of conditions supersedes that of persons, 
and culture takes precedence of politics. Two rulers of the tenth 
century interest him — Henry the Fowler, ' the real founder of 
the Empire ' and the patron of the towns, and the short-lived 
Otto III, the child of a Greek mother. In the conflict between 
Henry IV and Hildebrand he scarcely seems conscious of the great- 
ness of the greatest of the Popes. The third volume opens with a 
valuable survey of the towns in the eleventh century and their 
political influence. The personality of Barbarossa, the greatest 
figure since Charles the Great, is dismissed in a few lines as the 
type of a romantic hero of Wolfram or Hartmann von Aue. 
Frederick II, the most striking personality of the Middle Ages, 
called by his contemporaries Stupor Mundi, flits past like a shadow. 
After the fall of the Hohenstaufen the absence of great political 
figures makes us less conscious of the historian's weakness ; 
but even in his own field of Kulturgeschichte he is not always 
satisfactory. He has little to say of the great mystics, the glory 
of the fourteenth century. We reach the close of the Middle 
Ages with an uneasy feeling that our guide lacks the key to their 
deeper secrets. With Luther we meet the first personality 
whose importance seems to be fully grasped. He offers a fair 
account of his writings, and so far departs from his common 
practice as to quote passages from the Table Talk. In pointing 
out his failure to understand the Revolt of 1525 he carefully 
studies its social and economic causes. 

At this stage, having produced five volumes in rapid 
succession, the historian halted to reply to his critics. 
The novelty of treatment attracted untrained readers, and 
gave him a reputation which he hardly deserved. When 
Lamprecht was praised by amateurs, declared Lenz, 1 scholars 
must protest. The distinction between gewesen and geworden 
was ridiculous ; for Ranke had excelled in the genetic treatment 
1 Hist. Zeitschrift, vol. lxxvii. 



590 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, of historical problems. Lamprecht explained far less than 
XXVIII Ranke, for he made no attempt to relate German history 
to the main current of European affairs, and he failed to 
realise the importance of the great national figures. Examin- 
ing the volume on the Reformation, his own special period, Lenz 
declares that every page, almost every line, aroused protest. 
Other specialists spoke with equal severity on the treatment 
of their own periods. Rackfahl made a list of errors in a few 
pages on the sixteenth century, and showed in parallel columns 
how he plagiarised the work of other scholars. Haller, the editor 
of the Acts of the Council of Basel, declared that there were 
almost as many mistakes in the account of the Council as 
sentences. Finke, 1 the editor of the Acts of the Council of Con- 
stance, wrote a small volume to correct the picture of ecclesiastical 
conditions at the end of the Middle Ages. 

Lamprecht's first comprehensive reply appeared in his essays 
entitled ' Old and New Tendencies.' 3 In writing his ' German 
History,' he declared, he knew he would come into conflict with 
the dominant school. Yet no serious history was possible without 
some intellectual standpoint. Earlier schools had explained 
historic happenings by individual actions, that is by individual 
psychology. A new path had been opened by the study of social 
and economic development. He who recognised the operation 
of economic influences was often regarded as a materialist, 
because economic phenomena were ' material ' in opposition to 
art, literature or philosophy. Yet every economic act and change 
was psychologically conditioned as much as any intellectual 
act. The casual method was most easily applied in social and 
economic phenomena, and it was well to begin there. The history 
of persons must always contain an element of romance and 
speculation, because we can only guess at their motives. On the 
other hand the history of conditions will one day reach approxi- 
mately scientific truth. The key to history is to be found in 
collective psychology. In the long essay on Ranke which follows 
he carries the war into the enemy's camp. The great historian, 
he declares, sprinkled his pages with philosophic reflections. He 
was a mystic who believed that the development of humanity 
took place in obedience to unknown laws ; whereas complete 
causation could be established. The first task was to analyse 
the factors of historic life. It was this which he had attempted 
in the 'German History,' which was less a narrative than an 
essay in genetic interpretation. 

1 Die kirchlichen Verhdltnisse zu Ende des Mittelalters nach der 
Darstellung Lamprechts, 1896. 

- Alte und neue Richtungen in der Geschichtswissenschaft, 1896. 



HISTORY OF CIVILISATION 591 

The controversy was waged for several years in pamphlet CHAP, 
and periodical, the Leipsic Professor defending himself with XXVIII 
extraordinary determination against a host of assailants. His 
most comprehensive utterance is to be found in the lectures on 
Modern Historical Science, delivered in the United States in 1904. 1 
The fight, he declared, had been between the champions of 
individual and social psychology, between those who found the 
motive power in heroes and those who found it in conditions. 
Herder had discovered the psyche of the masses, and the Roman- 
tics continued his work. Ranke, and still more the Prussian 
School, had revived the individualist method. ' It was a time 
of almost purely political activity. The nation yearned in the 
very fibre of its soul for the long-coveted unity. With its attain- 
ment a new psychic no less than a new political world came 
into existence. Description was no longer the watchword, but 
comprehension.' Lamprecht pronounces primitive Germany 
symbolic, when imagination was strong and the individual was 
lost in the family and the clan. The early Middle Ages witnessed 
the development of types, and the era may therefore be described 
as typical. The later Middle Ages, a time of territorial rule and 
city life, was an era of conventions. The towns and the tenants, 
for instance, were not wholly free, and the period forms a transition 
to the era of individuals, which begins with the Renaissance and 
Reformation, and culminates in the Aufkldrung. The fifth or 
subjective stage begins with the romantic movement, the re- 
action of feeling against the cult of reason. We are now living 
in a period of nervous tension, marked by the spirit of enterprise, 
speculation, haste and anxiety, but inspired by no ruling ideal. 
These psychic stages occur in all countries. A vast work remains 
to be done in assessing the action of economic changes on social 
and psychic life ; and though they are not the only factor, 
material and hence social progress is the dominant stimulus to 
general advance. 

On resuming his History, Lamprecht showed that the 
criticisms of the first five volumes had left no trace. The treat- 
ment of the centuries since the Reformation exhibits the same 
faults as their predecessors. Those aspects which interest the 
historian are treated at length, while others of equal or greater 
importance receive little notice. Thus in the sixth volume we 
find a long chapter on early music and the development of instru- 
ments, in the seventh a detailed study of art. On reaching 
the Great War we approach as near to political narrative as he 
allows ; but though he writes with ardent patriotism of the Wars 

1 What is History ? 1905. 



592 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, of Liberation he has little to say of Stein and his colleagues. 

XXVIII Xhe sections dealing with philosophy, literature and art, with 
Kant and Beethoven, are vigorous and thoughtful ; and the 
volumes on the nineteenth century bear ample witness to his 
many-sided interest in the modern world. The work is com- 
pleted by three supplementary volumes on German history since 
1870. ' I know it is bold to write on my own time, as many know 
the parts and some know the whole better than I. For these I 
have not written.' What was needed was insight into the driving 
spiritual forces. The first volume surveys art, literature and spec- 
ulation, and discusses Wagner, Nietzsche and other pioneers. 
Wundt is hailed as the greatest philosopher since Kant, the founder 
of experimental psychology on which the further progress of 
philosophy depends. The second volume groups the phenomena 
of economic life round the twin principles of need and enjoyment, 
and describes the extension of communications, the development 
of international credit, advances in production, invention and 
technical education, the application of chemistry to industry 
and agriculture, the development of the Fourth Estate, emigra- 
tion, rings, the Polish labourer and many other questions. The 
third discusses the growth of parties, foreign relations, the 
colonies and the development of Welt-Politik. The work ends 
on a note of challenge to the political historians with whom Lam- 
precht's life has been a ceaseless feud. ' Human development 
is in no slavish dependence on political fortunes. Political 
self-preservation depends on the development of the ideal values 
of art and science, religion, law and morality ; for only in their 
cultivation do national and cosmopolitan tendencies combine.' 

The ' German History ' possesses the merit, if merit it be, 
of compelling attention. It is a work of rare intellectual vigour 
and originality, and its insistence on economic factors, its 
theory of rhythmic psychological transformations, and its 
emphasis on art and culture contributed to broaden the con- 
ception of history. But it is excluded from the front rank by 
grave faults. A detailed survey of the whole course of civilisa- 
tion in Germany can only be successfully attempted on the co- 
operative method. Lamprecht is well versed in economics and 
art ; but the student of political and ecclesiastical history will 
derive little aid from his pages. The book is of little use to 
scholars, and its daring generalisations are a danger to the 
beginner. In the reaction against the political school he presents 
Germania without her political backbone. His neglect of the 
element of personality is a grave flaw. Finally his abstract 
terminology and barbarous compounds give the work a some- 



HISTORY OF CIVILISATION 593 

what forbidding scholastic air. None the less the University CHAP, 
of Leipsic has created for her celebrated Professor a great XXVIII 
Historical Institute, with a separate building, an ample equip- 
ment of maps and plans, and a handsome sum for a library. 
No historical teacher in Europe can boast such a reward for his 
zeal and such a field for his talent. 

Whatever be thought of Lamprecht's theories and writings, 
the growing popularity of Kulturgeschichte is in large measure 
due to his strenuous activities. Among the most capable 
workers in the field is Steinhausen, who founded the Archiv 
fiir Kulturgeschichte in 1903. The most important of his mono- 
graphs, the ' History of German Letter-writing,' is a useful 
excursion into a little-known world. The value of the book 
was at once recognised, and the author received assistance from 
the Berlin Academy in the publication of German letters of the 
Middle Ages. The most ambitious work l since Lamprecht is 
the survey of modern Europe on which Bre.azssi g js now engaged. 
Schooled in political history, the Berlin Professor felt the need 
of transcending national boundaries and of representing every 
aspect of historic life. His aim was to supply not a mere aggregate 
of details nor a series of monographs on different countries, but 
a unified picture of civilisation. The chief theme and problem 
of history, he declared, was the social and moral relations of man 
• — the relation of personality to the community. He proceeds 
to discuss the factors of history — the family, the people, the 
State, social and anti-social instincts, the currents of feeling 
which dominate action and determine events. The historical 
survey begins with a summary of ancient and mediaeval history, 
as steps to modern times ; but though it fills 1500 pages, it 
makes no pretence to original study. The real task is only 
reached with the fourteenth century. It is characteristic of 
his sympathies that the classical and mediaeval volumes are 
dedicated to the memory of Burckhardt and Nitzsch. 

If political history and Kulturgeschichte have sometimes 
appeared to be antagonistic, it is because they have been too 
narrowly defined. Both are needed — and equally needed — to 
attain the goal, which is nothing less than the record and inter- 
pretation of the life of humanity. Time has dissipated the 
trivial charges and smoothed the angry jealousies of the rival 
schools. The one is no more bound to neglect conditions than 
the other to disdain individuals. The method varies with the 

1 Chamberlain's Foundations of the Nineteenth Century is rather a work 
of theory, founded on the paradoxes of Gobineau and Nietzsche, than of 
history. 

2 Q 



594 HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 

CHAP, theme ; for civilisation is the fruit of effort and achievement 
XXVIII working along many lines. While historical science is thus 
extending its conquests in every direction, the philosophy of 
history lags behind. But though it is not yet possible to formu- 
late laws explaining the purpose and the plan of human evolution, 
every true historian contributes equally with the student of 
science and psychology to the progress of our knowledge of 
man. 



INDEX 



Acton, 375-6, 379-93 
Adams, C. F., 424 
Adams, Henry, 409 
Alison, 304-5 
Allard, 568 
Allen, C. F., 448 
Allen, John, 286 
Altamira, 443-4 
Amari, 437 
Amelineau, 505-6 
Anquetil Du Perron, 518 
Armstrong, 401 
Arneth, 425-7 
Arnold, Gottfried, 535 
Arnold, Thomas, 319-20 
Arnold, Wilhelm, 5S4 
Astruc, 521 
Aulard, 250-3 
Aumale, Due d', 217 
Avenel, 215 

Babeau, 224 
Bagwell, 400 
Balbo, 438 

Bancroft, George, 403-7 
Bancroft, H. H., 408-9 
Barante, 174-5, 231 
Baronius, 3, 534 
Batiffol, Louis, 215 
Batiffol, Pierre, 571 
Baumgarten, 152 
Baur, 538-41 
Bazin, 215 
Beard, 547 
Beaufort, 6 
Becker, 474 
Beloch, 481-2 
Benecke, 61-2 
Berard, 485 
Bevan, 487 
Bignon, 201 
Bilbassoff, 452 
Blanc, Louis, 228-31 
Bockh, 30-41 
Bodin, 4 
Bohmer, 68-71 
Boislisle, 221 
Boissier, 474 



Boni, 474 

Bopp, 519 

Borghesi, 455 

Bossuet, 5, 7, 10, 11 

Botta, C, 434-5 

Botta, P., 509 

Bourgeois, 222, 224 

Bousset, 531, 541 

Boutaric, 222 

Breasted, 505-6 

Brewer, 356-7, 399 

Breyssig, 593 

Broglie, Due de, 222-3, 556 

Brown, Hume, 400 

Brugsch, 502-3 

Brunn, 489 

Brunner, 47, 213, 398 

Bryce, 400 

Buchez, 226 

Buckle, 585 

Burckhardt, 580-4 

Burnouf, 507, 518, 520 

Burton, 400 

Bury, 472, 484, 494 

Busolt, 480 

Cabrol, 569 
Canovas, 443 
Cantu, 438-9 
Capponi, 439-40 
Carlson, 449 
Carlyle, 323-32 
Champollion, 497-8 
Chassin, 254 
Chateaubriand, 161-2 
Cherest, 223 
Cheruel, 217, 220 
Chevalier, 568 
Cheyne, 531 
Chuquet, 252-3, 277 
Church, 548 
Clinton, 309-10, 320 
Colebrooke, 519 
Colletta, 435 
Comte, 585 
Conde, 442 
Cornelius, 561 
Cornford, 488 



596 

Cornill, 531 
Cousin, 218-19 
Coxe, 306 
Creighton, 374-8 
Cretineau-Joly, 556-7 
Creuzer, 38 
Curtius, 34, 40, 475-8 

Dalhmann, 130-1, 147 
Dahn, 495 

Dan vila y Collado, 443-4 
Dareste, 225 
Daru, 1 60-1 
Daudet, 254 
Daunou, 159-60 
Delbriick, 155, 485 
Delehaye, 569 
Delisle, 207-8 
Delitzsch, 509, 532-3 
Denifle, 566-8 
Dessau, 459, 464 
Diehl, 493-4 

Dieterich, 488 

Dill, 584 

Dixon, 547 

Dollinger, 551-2, 558-60 

Domaszewski, 459, 472 

Dorner, 542, 547 

Dorpfeld, 479, 490 

Doumergue, 547 

Doyle, 401 

Driault, 277 

Driver, 531 

Droysen, 134-40, 486 

Droz, 226-7 

Druffel, 561 

Drumann, 457 

Ducange, 490 

Duchesne, 571-2 

Duhm, 524 

Duhr, 569 

Dumichen, 503 

Duncker, 133, 474, 511 

Duro, 444 

Duruy, 225, 466-7, 484 

Duvergier de Hauranne, 278 

Ebers, 505 

Eichhorn, J. G., 521-2 

Eichhorn, K. F., 43-7 

Erdmannsdorffer, 138, 155 

Erman, 505-6 

Evans, Arthur, 513-15 

Ewald, 522-3 

Fagniez, 216 
Falkiner, Litton, 400 
Fallmerayer, 452-3, 491 
Farnell, 488 
Fauriel, 164-5 



INDEX 



Ferrari, 436-7 
Ferrero, 470-1 
Ficker, 125, 429-30 
Finke, 568, 590 
Finlay, 491-2 
Firth, 399 
Fisher, 401 
Fiske, 409 
Fitzmaurice, 400 
Flach, 213 
Flammermont, 224 
Flassan, 160 
Fortescue, 400 
Fowler, Warde, 469, 473 
Frazer, 488 
Fredericq, 447 
Freeman, 336-7, 346-52 
f Freret, 6, 13 
Freytag, 577-80 
Friedj ung, 428 
Friedlander, 473-4, 584 
Friedrich, 560 
Froude, 332-9 
Fruin, 448 
Fryxell, 449 
Funk, 568 
Furtwangler, 488 

Fustel de Coulanges, 209-13, 472-3 
Fyffe, 401 

Gachard, 447 
Gairdner, 399, 547 
Gardiner, 359-65 
Gardthausen, 472 
Garstang, 516 
Gasquet, 569 
Geijer, 449 
Gelzer, 494 
Gervinus, 1 08-1 12 
Gfrorer, 493 
Gibbon, 7, 11, 490 
Gierke, 396 

Giesebrecht, 113-14, 122-7 
Gieseler, 537 
Gindely, 432-3 
Giry, 208 
Glaser, 517 
Gomperz, 488 
Goncourt, de, 223, 238 
Gorres, 553 
Gorres Society, 569 
Gothein, 586-8 
Graf, 524-5 
Green, 352-8 
Green, Mrs., 400 
Greenidge, 469 
Gregorovius, 472, 494, 584 
Grimm, Jacob, 54-63 
Grimm, Wilhelm, 55-62 
Grisar, 568 



INDEX 



597 



Groen van Prinsterer, 419, 447-S 

Grote, 312-18 

Grotefend, 507 

Gueranger, 557 

Guerard, 206-7 

Guettee, 557 

Guizot, 175, 181, 186-92 

Gutschmid, 50S-9, 519 

Hallam, 282-4, 2 9 2 -4 

Hammer, 425 

Hanotaux, 216, 281 

Harnack, 542, 544, 567 

Harrison, Miss, 48S 

Hase, 537, 547-8 

Hatch, 541-2 

Hauck, 546, 548 

Haureau, 214 

Hausrath, 541, 56S 

Hausser, 13 1-3 

Haussonville, Count G. d', 220 

Haussonville, Count J. d', 256 

Haverfield, 472 

Havet, Julien, 209 

Heeren, 26, 32, 404 

Hefele, 552-3, 561 

Hegel, G., 103, 139, 487-8, 524, 

533 
Hegel, Karl, 51, 117 
Heitland, 467-S 
Helbig, 485 
Hellwald, 585-6 
Henne-Am-Rhyn, 586 
Herculano da Carvalho, 444-5 
Herder, 9, 29, 54, 521 
Hergenrother, 494, 561-2 
Hermann, Gottfried, 33-4 
Heyd, 494 
Heyne, 26-7, 29 
Hildreth, 407-8 
Hinschius, 546 
Hirschfeld, 472 
Hodgkin, 400-1 
Hodgson, 520 
Hofler, 432, 554 
Hogarth, 490, 517 
Holm, 480-1 
Holmes, Rice, 470 
Hoist, 410 
Holtzmann, 541 
Hommel, 512, 533 
Homolle, 489 
Hopf, 492-3 
Houssaye, 270-4 
Howorth, 401 
Huber, 560 
Hugo, 42-3 
Hiilsen, 474 

Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 57 
Hume, D., 7, 10, 11 



Hume, Martin, 401 
Hunter, Sir W., 401 
Hurter, 425 

Ideler, 41 

Ihering, 51 

Ihne, 466-7 

Irving, Washington, 410-12 

Jaffe, 1 15-16 

Janssen, 562-4 

Jebb, 489 

Jeremias, 534 

Jobez, 222-3 

Jones, Sir W., 519 

Jordan, 474 

Jiilicher, 541 

Jullian, Camille, 210, 472 

Juste, 447 

Karamsin, 450 

Karst, 486 

Kawerau, 547, 564 

Kemble, 289-90 

Kervyn de Lettenhove, 447 

King, 512 

Kinglake, 306, 401 

Kittel, 530-1, 533 

Klopp, 138, 428 

Kluchevsky, 451 

Kolde, 377, 547, 564, 567 

Kopke, 115 

Kopp, 445-6 

Koser, 155, 332 

Kostlin, 547, 564 

Kostomarov, 451 

Kovalevsky, 253, 585 

Kraus, 570-1 

Krumbacher, 494 

Kuenen, 525, 52S 

Lachmann, 62-3 

Lai'uente, 443 

La Gorce, 253, 279-80 

Lamartine, 227-8 

Lamprecht, 588-93 

Lanciani, 474 

Lanfrey, 256-8 

Lang, 400 

Lange, 472 

Langen, 561 

Lanzac de Laborie, 277 

Lassen, 507, 519 

Laurent, 586 

Lavallee, 220, 225 

Lavisse, 214, 219-20, 225 

Layard, 509-10 

Lea, 546 

Leake, 40 

Le Blant, ss? 



598 



INDEX 



Lecky, 365-9 
Lefebvre, 201 
Legrelle, 220 
Lehmann, 155 
Leibnitz, 5, 9, 12 
Lelewel, 452 
Lemontey, 217, 221 
Lenormant, 511 
Lenotre, 254 
Lenz, 155, 564, 589 
Leo, 103-4 
Lepsius, 498-501 
Lessing, 9, 27 
Levasseur, 224, 585 
Levy, Arthur, 274-6 
Lewis, Cornewall, 20, 320 
Lightfoot, 542, 544 
Lingard, 284, 290-2 
Litta, 438 
Llorente, 442 
Lobeck, 38, 488 
Long, 469 
Lossen, 561 
Luchaire, 213, 546 
Luden, 72-3 
Lumbroso, A., 441 
Lumbroso, G., 505 

Maassen, 561 

Mabillon, 4, 5, 429 

Macalister, 532 

Macaulay, 294-304 

Machiavelli, 2, 18 

Mackintosh, 301 

Madelin, 277 

Madvig, 473 

Mahaffy, 487, 489 

Mahan, 422-4 

Maitland, 393-9 

Mannhardt, 60 

Marcks, 155 

Marczali, 434 

Mariette, 501-2 

Marquardt, 460, 473 

Martin, Henri, 213, 224-5 

Martineau, H., 307 

Maspero, 503-4, 512 

Masson, D., 399 

Masson, F., 260-6 

Mau, 474 

Maximilian II, 11 6-1 7 

Menendez y Pelayo, 444 

Merivale, 320-2 

Merle d'Aubigne, 547 

Meyer, Eduard, 483-4, 505-6, 512, 

53i 

Michaud, 162-3 
Michel et, 59, 175-85 
Middleton, 474 
Mignet, 193-9 



Mill, James, 306 

Milman, 522, 545-6 

Mitford, 308-9 

Mitteis, 472 

Mohler, 549-51 

Molinier, 208 

Mommsen, 454-65 

Monod, 120, 208 

Montalembert, 554-5 

Montefiore, 531 

Montesquieu, 9, 18 

Morgan, de, 505-6, 511 

Morley, 400, 584 

Mortimer-Ternaux, 237 

Mosheim, 535 

Motley, 416-19 

Muller, Johannes, 7, 11, 22, 71-5 

Muller, Max, 488, 520 

Muller, Otfried, 35-41 

Munch, 449-50 

Muratori, 5, 12, 13 

Murray, Gilbert, 485 

Napier, 305-6 
Napoleon, Prince, 259-60 
Neander, 535-7 
Nettement, 278 
Nicolas, Harris, 285-6 
Niebuhr, 14-24, 28, 31 
Niese, 486 
Nippold, 548 
Nissen, 468 
Nitzsch, 469, 585 
Noldeke, 519 
Nolhac, 224 
Norgate, 399 

Oman, 401 
Ozanam, 555-6 

Pais, 468 

Palacky, 430-2 

Palfrey, 407 

Palgrave, 286-9 

Paparrigopoulos, 453 

Paris, Gaston, 214 

Paris, Paulin, 214 

Parker, 474 

Parkman, 419-21 

Pastor, 564-6, 568 

Paul, Herbert, 400 

Paulus, Nicholas, 568 

Payne, 401 

Pears, Edwin, 494 

Pelham, 470 

Perrot, 488, 512 

Pertz, 66-8 

Peter, 466 

Petrie, Flinders, 504-16, 532 

Pfleiderer, 541, 547 



INDEX 



599 



Phillips, 553 
Pichler, 494 
Pirenne, 447 
Pitra, 557 
Poirson, 215 
Pollard, 399 
Pollock, 393-5 
Prescott, 412-16 
Putter, 42 

Quicherat, 207 
Quinet, 234-7 

Rambaud, 224-5, 280, 493 

Ramsay, J., 399 

Ramsay, W., 516, 543-4 

Ranke, 76-129 

Raumer, 73-4 

Rawlinson, George, 511 

Rawlinsou, Henry, 507-8 

Raynouard, 163 

Reinach, Salomon, 488 

Renan, 214, 527-3°. 543, 54 6 

Renier, 472 

Reusch, 559-60 

Reuss, 524, 531 

Rhodes, J. F., 409-10 

Richter, 546 

Ridgeway, 485 

Riehl, 574-7 

Riezler, 155 

Ritschi, 541-2, 547 

Ritter, Moriz, 155 . 

Robertson, 7, 10, 11 

Rogers, Thorold, 5S5 

Rohde, 488-9 

Rohricht, 128, 494 

Romanin, 440 

Rose, 400-1 

Rosebery, 369, 400 

Rossi, de, 558 

Rothe, 541 

Rotteck, 104-5 

Round, 349, 399 

Rouge, 502 

Rousset, 220 

Rubino, 456 

Ruble, 214 

Sabatier, 546 
Sainte-Beuve, 221, 224 
Sanctis, G. de, 467 
Sarzec, de, 510 
Savigny, 47-53, 55, g 3-4 
Sayce, 513, 516 
Scaliger, 4 
Schafer, A., 486 
Schafer, D., 586-8 
Schlegel, A. W., 20, 56-7 
Schlegel, F., 519 



Schliemann, 478-9, 513 

Schlosser, 105-8 

Schlumberger, 493 

Schmidt, Adolf, 115, 134, 238 

Schmoller, 155, 585 

Schrader, 508-9 

Schulte, 561 

Schiirer, 531 

Schwegler, 20, 540 

Seeley, 369-74 

Segur, 220, 223, 224 

Sichel, 400 

Sickel, 428-9 

Sismondi, 165-8 

Smedt, de, 569 

Smith, George, 508, 512 

Smith, Goldwin, 399 

Smith, Robertson, 527 

Sohm, 542 

Soloviev, 451 

Soltau, 459 

Sorel, 224, 246-9, 276-7 

Sparks, 402-3 

Spedding, 399 

Sprenger, 544-5 

Stade, 526-7 

Stanley, 523 

Steenstrup, 449 

Stein, 64-9 

Stenzel, 74-5 

Strauss, 540, 547 

Strzygowski, 494 

Stubbs, 340-6, 397 

Sybel, 112-14, 117, 124-5, i 2 7-9, 

140-7 
Symonds, 584 

Taine, 238-46, 258-9 
Thibaut, 48-51 
Thierry, Amedee, 173-4 
Thierry, Augustin, 169-173 
Thiers, 199-205 
Thirlwall, 310-12, 317 
Thureau-Dangin, 278-9 
Tiele, 512 
Tillemont, 3 
Tobler, 532 
Tocqueville, 231-4 
Tomek, 432 
Tosti, 436 
Treitschke, 147-55 
Trevelyan, G. M., 401 
Trevelyan, G. O., 400 
Troya, 435-6 
Turgot, 9 
Turner, F., 424 
Turner, Sharon, 282 

Usexer, 488 



6oo 



INDEX 



Valois, Noel, 568 

Vandal, 266-70 

Vatke, 524 

Vico, 6, 9, 19 

Villari, 440-1 

Vinogradoff, 395-6, 452 

Viollet, 213, 224 

Voigt, 73 

Voltaire, 7, 8, 11, 490, 573 

Voss, 15, 28, 38 

Waddington, 223 
Waitz, 117-22 
Waliszewski, 452 
Wallon, 237-8 
Walpole, Spencer, 400 
Ward, A., 401 
Ward, W., 569 
Webb, 400 
Weil, 544 
Weiss, 568 

Weiszacker, Julius, 117 
Weiszacker, Karl, 541 



Welcker, 26, 39, 41 
Wellhausen, 524-6 
Wernle, 541 
Wette, de, 524 
Wilamowitz, 485 
Wilcken, 464 
Wilken, 71-2 
Willems, 473 
Wilpert, 568 
Winckelmann, 7, 25-6 
Winckler, 512, 516, 533-4 
Winsor, Justin, 408 
Wissowa, 473 
Wolf, 19, 26-9 
Worsaae, 449 

Young, 497 

Zacharia von Lingenthal, 494 

Zahn, 541 

Zeller, Berthold, 215 

Zeller, Eduard, 488, 540 

Zoega, 25-6 



THE END 



PRINTED BY 

SPOTTISWOODE AND CO. LTD., COLCHESTER 

LONDON AND ETON 



8^ 



